


Convergence

by Defira



Series: Wild Mage [6]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-29 21:17:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3911008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Divine Justinia has called for an end to the war between mages and templars, and all of Thedas turns towards the small village of Haven, watching and waiting with bated breath for the outcome. It is the greatest conclave in an age, at least- some say there has not been a gathering like it since the signing of the Llomerryn Accords in the twilight years of the Storm Age. But, for such a grand event, there are several notable figures absent from the proceedings. </p><p>The woman once called Champion turns her face away, ashamed that her name has been used as a rallying call for war and rebellion. Another woman, a Hero to some, hides in an old fortress in the mountains, alone with the ghosts in her head. Would-be heroes, chafing at the bonds of responsibility and duty, wait for their moment to step forward and claim their own stories.  </p><p>Change is coming to the world- and the fate of many will converge on one single, unfathomable moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nevarra

**Author's Note:**

> Mallorie Hawke belongs to [apocalyptichero](http://apocalyptichero.tumblr.com) and is Jo's younger cousin, the only child of Malcolm's younger brother  
> Siobhan belongs to [shemrightsactivist](http://shemrightsactivist.tumblr.com) and for the sake of this universe, is not a Hawke

**9:41 Dragon**  
_Villa Gottschalk, just outside Nevarra City_

_One month to the Conclave_

“Josefina! _Mierda!_ Are you trying to offer the creature a _hug_ , or are you trying to fight?”

Jo gritted her teeth and lunged, skidding to her knees under the swinging sword that would have taken off her head had she been a second slower, using the forward momentum to lurch back to her feet and stagger about in time to raise her daggers. The horrifying spectre spun around with her, the rusted greatsword whistling through the air towards her neck, and when she blocked the strike with her crossed knives, she grunted in pain as the impact rattled all the way through her shoulders and up her spine until she swore she could feel it bounce around in her skull.

Her hair was plastered to her head with sweat, and as she danced backwards out of reach she tried to smear the worst of it out of her eyes, panting as the revenant howled and stalked after her. One hand reached towards her, black mist dancing around skeletal fingers, and Jo growled in frustration as she felt the weight of the magic winding around her limbs, trying to whip her back through the air towards the waiting blade. She planted her feet in the dirt, shifting her weight to accommodate the pressure of the spell, and then dug frantically into her belt pouch for an active runestone. 

The revenant roared, and Jo felt the pulse of magic batter at her and she slipped, one foot sliding out from under her and then she was soaring through the air towards the upheld sword and-

“ _Joder!_ Micaela, end the summons.”

With a jarring thud, Jo went sprawling into the dirt of the abruptly empty training ring, wheezing weakly as the wind rushed out of her lungs; the creature’s roars echoed only in her ears, while the handle of one of her daggers stuck awkwardly into her ribs where it rested underneath her. Panting, feeling the dirt stick to the sweat on her face, she made a rude gesture back towards the portico where her grandmother and her cousin waited. “I’ve actually fought a revenant _before_ , you know,” she rasped, easing herself up slowly onto her knees and wincing at the ache in her right knee.

“Perhaps you should fight like it then,” Grand Duchess Sofia Gottschalk called pointedly, tapping her cane against the marble tiles. From where she knelt at her feet, nineteen year old Micaela giggled, covering her mouth with her hands. 

Jo fixed her with a look and pressed a hand to her ribs. “I’ll remember this blatant treachery when I’m head of the house,” she said in mock warning, gritting her teeth at the sharp pain in her shoulder from the old injury against the Arishok; should have warmed up more before the bout. Micaela stuck her tongue out at her, so much like a younger Bethany in her features that Jo’s heart ached, even if Bethany would rather have died than touched necromancy. 

More like Mal, then. Mal wouldn’t have had a problem summoning spectres just for the sake of playing with them.

Sofia made a scoffing noise, rolling her eyes at the performance between the two of them. “Stop rolling around in the dirt like a Fereldan- you’ve got a visitor.”

Staggering over to the edge of the training yard and groaning as she bent to pick up a towel from the bench beside the wall, Jo said “It’s not another suitor, is it? I would’ve hoped by now-”

“I would _hope_ that you would treat him with courtesy in my house, Josefina, given how far he has travelled.”

Jo hesitated, swinging the towel up over her shoulders. “Who is it, Lita?” she asked softly, a sense of dread creeping into her.

“He seems like a nice boy-”

“ _Grandmother_ ,” she said sharply, turning to face her, her hand clenched into a fist where she rested it on the wall. 

Sofia, one of the women Jo had been named for and a woman she tried to emulate herself after in all things, drew herself up proudly. “He said he was the Prince of Starkhaven.”

***

Villa Gottschalk was ancient place, full of secrets and memories that Jo knew she would never understand or fully uncover; the manor was older than Nevarra’s sovereignty, the date the foundations had been laid lost to the mists of time and the ravages of a dozen wars and several Blights. It was older than the Third Blight, that much was certain, for there were crypts and tunnels deep beneath the cellars that stretched for miles, some of them possibly stretching so far as to tunnel under the mighty Minanter River. 

A few times over the past four years, she’d gone exploring to amuse herself, Mal trailing along after her and chattering away endlessly. Their voices had echoed through the vast corridors, the light of their lantern barely a drop in the sea of darkness, and they had encountered all manner of wonderful, terrible things down there. Armories left to rust, the walls stacked high with weapons but caked in dust and cobwebs; crypts where the bodies lay at rest without having been burned in the Andrastian faith, or mummified in the Nevarran way. There were signs of pitched battles in places, the stone walls nicked from the flurry of blades in close quarters fighting, while the dead- both human and otherwise- lay in the quiet horror in which they had fallen. 

Jo had seen enough darkspawn to recognise the leathery corpses and misshapen skeletons, and she’d asked her grandmother how deep the hallways ran, whether it was possible they stretched all the way to the Deep Roads, given how close they were to Tevinter. Her grandmother had scoffed at her fears, indomitable old crone that she was, and had declared it impossible for the darkspawn to take her by surprise 

Jo had made it a point to never visit the crypts alone, after that. 

It was a joke in the household that, on a clear day, you could see all the way to Hunter Fell, where the Old God Toth had finally been brought down. She had no desire to test the safety of the ancient hallways so close to a site of such brutal, unprecedented carnage. 

And even once one made their way aboveground to the villa proper, there was still so much to discover, so much to learn; the Gottschalks were not perhaps the most prestigious amongst Nevarran families, but they were old, and they were powerful, and their name carried weight even if they did not bear a king amongst their lineage. 

More than the weight of their name, however, the Gottschalk family were the last of the Hunters- keepers of an ancient order known as the Veiled Brotherhood, sworn to patrol the places in the world where the veil grew thin and frayed and demons crept through to torment the living. There were not many outside of Nevarra who still recognised the order for what it was, but those that did...

Well. Any organisation that tiptoed carefully around the Chantry’s demands for all mages to be confined to a Circle was an organisation to be feared. 

They had private archives that detailed the history of Thedas over the last several hundred years- minus the few occasions where war or blights had precipitated their departure without a chance to safely store their records. They had accounts of the rise and fall of empires, of magics that would make the Archon himself swoon away in a dead faint out of horror, and of scandals and politicking that rivalled even the reach of the Antivan Crows, or the House of Repose. 

In an unassuming villa outside of Nevarra City, on the river flats staring north towards Tevinter, the Gottschalk family trained each new generation to hunt and kill demons and the worst of maleficarum. 

And in the same unassuming villa outside of Nevarra City, Josefina Sofia Gottschalk- known to the world at large as Jo Hawke, erstwhile Champion of Kirkwall-, had fled to the safety of her grandmother’s arms after leaving behind the destruction and the horror of the Gallows city behind her. For four years, she had eluded the hunters who couldn’t believe that someone so notorious would be audacious enough to remain in the public eye. For four years, she had done her best to lick her wounds and recover from the nightmare that was Kirkwall, and forgive herself for turning tail and fleeing at the first available opportunity.

She’d never wanted to go to Kirkwall anyway- Nevarra had always been her first choice, by far. Malcolm might’ve been gone, but they still had family who would love them and take them in. In Nevarra, they would have a home again, and in Nevarra she might have a chance to take up the mantle that her father had been training her for prior to his death. 

She got there nearly eight years later than she’d intended, with death and blood trailing in her wake and weighing down her soul. 

And now her past had finally caught up to her, in the form of a long overdue visit from a man she’d once called a friend and a brother in arms. She couldn’t even bring herself to ask whether or not Siobhan was with him, the woman she loved as fiercely as she loved her own sister- she’d spent so long trying to put distance between herself and the events of Kirkwall that she’d pushed hard against the people who only wanted to love her. 

After all, wasn’t it better that they were safe and alive and hated her, than to have them snatched away from her because she was too selfish and wanted their love and kept them in constant danger?

It was all that had helped her sleep at night these past few years.

Jo excused herself from the training yard, ostensibly so that she could clean herself up from the mess she’d made of herself rolling around in the dust, but more so that she could take the time by herself to prepare emotionally for the meeting. Whether it was just Sebastian by himself, or whether Siobhan was with him, she had apologies to make.

And where could she even hope to begin? _I’m sorry I fled from all of my responsibilities, and left you all with a broken city and the beginnings of a war; I’m sorry I didn’t stay to protect Varric from the Seekers, or to help Bethany smuggle the survivors of the Gallows to safety..._

It’d be easier if she just opened with ‘ _Sorry it’s been so long coming, but I’m a coward and an asshole_ ’.

Her grandmother had informed her to attend the River Room once she had collected herself, a lavish little parlour with a glorious view north across the Minanter- and, she noted with gritted teeth, a bay window that faced towards the training courtyard. Granted, the view was not spectacular, but there was every chance that her guest- or guests, plural- would have seen her fighting the revenant conjuration, and seen her make a fool of herself. 

She didn’t doubt for a moment that the choice of room had been deliberate on her grandmother’s part. 

Jo’s room was at the far end of the house, in the family wing- apparently the very same room that her father had slept in as a young man, before fate and the pleas of the Grey Wardens had led him to Kirkwall. She quite preferred the dark wood panels and the muted greys and blues of the furnishings- it was quiet, and austere, and didn’t impose any hurtful expectations upon her lack of femininity. Her grandmother was two steps ahead of her, and was clearly responsible for the fact that the clawfoot bathtub in her bathing chamber was already full and steaming, and she tried not to scowl at how efficiently Sofia had outplayed her. 

She stripped off quickly and scrubbed away the dirt and the sweat, dunking her head under the water and slicking her short hair back against her skull. Her brain danced away from her at a million leagues a minute, stressing over every tiny detail and fussing over every impossible disaster that could have prompted his reappearance in her life- Bethany was dead, Bethany had been captured by the rogue templars, Siobhan was dead, Siobhan _and_ Bethany were dead, Fenris had been dragged back to Tevinter in chains...

She scowled at herself as she toweled herself roughly dry, rolling her eyes at her own descent towards the dramatic. If it was urgent, Sebastian wouldn’t have come as a guest would, politely waiting in a salon while servants offered him platters of alfajores and decadent dessert empanadas. Her grandmother had a sweet tooth that made her head spin, and any guest to Villa Gottschalk was inevitably plied with an endless train of sweet pastries and candies, most of which found increasingly inventive ways to include dulce de leche in the mix. As she struggled to dress herself, wincing at the new aches and bruises that were blooming across her ribs, she couldn’t help but smile for a brief moment at the thought of Siobhan being bewildered by the array of sweets.

She’d promised her the world when they’d met in Gwaren all those years ago, both frightened and exhausted and trying to keep a level head amongst the panicked masses fleeing the Blight; Siobhan had rescued Bethany out from under the suspicious watch of a band of templars, refugees themselves but apparently still zealous enough to put aside their flight to safety in order to pursue their duty. In that moment, they’d forged a fast friendship, and Jo had promised Siobhan anything her heart could possibly desire as recompense for saving her sister. 

Siobhan’s heart had desired Sebastian, and Jo had driven him away.

Her stomach soured miserably, and she pulled on the finest of her Nevarran fashion- her kinsfolk had more liberal views on acceptable attire than either Ferelden or Kirkwall had ever had, and her preference for wearing her chest bound was far more suited to the sleeker Nevarran styles than the silk and frills of the Free Marches she’d endured with gritted teeth for so many years. 

Sofia had said that Sebastian had introduced himself as the Prince of Starkhaven, so she dressed to meet him as the Grey Lady of Nevarra City. The fact that he’d invoked his title didn’t set her heart at ease, and only made her more certain that this visit was nothing more than a long overdue severance of any lingering affection between them. Better that she go in as someone who was all but a stranger to him- maybe the heartbreak wouldn’t be so excruciating if she could pretend they were mere acquaintances, rather than old friends who had spent the better part of a decade upholding one another and bleeding together and finding strength in their friendship when the world had fallen down around them. 

She smoothed her hands down the front of her grey velvet doublet, trying to ignore the way they trembled. The old scar on her shoulder ached, and she tried not to think of the haze of pain filled months following the battle in the Viscount’s Hall, when Siobhan had stubbornly stayed by her side despite Jo’s aggressive frustration and abiding depression, and had helped her to regain some use in her shattered arm. 

How splendidly she’d repaid her for that dedication. 

With no good reason to stall but her own cowardice, Jo drew herself upright with a shaky breath, turning towards the door and marching from the room before she could second guess herself. The hallways seemed to stretch out before her into infinity, an impossibly long journey that seemed to take only the blink of an eye- and then she was pushing open the double doors to the River Room, holding her breath as the world around her crystallized into a frozen moment. 

The room was done up in a pleasant teal theme, the polished wood a dark, rich mahogany counterpoint and the cushions and upholstery an almost shimmering cream; it was one of her favourite rooms in the entire manor, the colours deep and soothing, and being able to see across the river towards the horizon was still a novelty and a balm to her soul. 

Kirkwall had been a narrow, towering jumble, clinging to the hillside of a harbour that was almost entirely natural cliffs. There were no breathtaking views, no horizon to dream of- it was just cages within cages, choking and suffocating under the weight of the stone and the weight of the horrors that dwelt there. 

She’d never considered herself claustrophobic before Kirkwall. 

He stood by the window, hands clasped comfortably behind his back as he gazed out over the garden towards the river; it was the same river he would have been able to see from his window each morning in Starkhaven, the city of his birth that he had taken back shortly after she had fled for Nevarra. 

A city he’d taken with Siobhan at his side, and Bethany and Fenris for support; a city she should have helped him to take back, just as she’d promised years ago, and yet had turned her back on, just like with all of her responsibilities. 

Gone was the white and gold armour she remembered from Kirkwall, the look of a man not quite a prince and not quite a brother of faith. Instead, he wore the most brilliant red and black, the colours of the Starkhaven heraldry, his boots polished to a midnight ebony so deep she wondered whether she’d fall into them if she stared too long. His leather coat hung to his knees, the blood red scale pattern one that she recognised as dragonling- easily worth a prince’s ransom. His fingers, where he clasped his hands behind his back, all bore rings and marks of his office, any one of them worth more than the coin she’d earned in her entire first year in Kirkwall. 

He looked every bit the powerful regent he’d become, older and calmer and more comfortable in the authority he wielded. 

She felt even more the wretch for having fled.

“Jo?”

She lurched in surprise at the softer voice, her cheeks flushing guiltily at having been caught staring even as her stomach dropped into her shoes. The moons would have crumbled to dust long before she ever forgot the owner of that voice, and she bit her lip as she turned slowly towards the settee, unable to help the broken gasp that escaped her. 

For there was Siobhan, utterly radiant and utterly perfect in a gown of white and gold, her dark skin aglow as if she was-

Jo blinked, her knees suddenly weak- Siobhan’s gown had been cut to accommodate the subtle curve of her belly, and given the way she rested her hands around the gentle bulge, it was impossible to miss.

“You’re pregnant?” she whispered, her voice hoarse as she blinked away tears.

“And isn’t that a fine hello, after so many years absence,” Sebastian said from the window, his hands still hooked behind him as he turned to face them. There were a few hints of silver at his temples, just enough to draw the eye against the rich auburn of his hair, and there were laughter lines at the corner of his mouth; he was lighter, more sure of himself, and it struck her that he was _happy_ , in a way she’d never seen in him before. He laughed warmly. “Struck dumb, are we? I can’t say I blame you, she is a vision to behold, after all.”

“Sebastian,” Siobhan scolded gently, a bemused smile on her face and a faint flush of colour in her cheeks.

Jo felt her cheeks burn and looked away hastily, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand; it felt absurdly like she was intruding on a private moment between them, something small and quiet and intimate, made of laughter and love. 

_The world moved on without you while you cowered beneath your grandmother’s skirts..._

“She misses you, you know,” Sebastian said, settling into the chair beside his wife with a smile, draping his arm around her shoulders. “I suspect she only sends half of the letters she actually writes to you.”

“You are just determined to cause mischief today, aren’t you?” Siobhan slapped him lightly on the knee and then pulled herself to her feet with only minor difficulty, Sebastian’s hand immediately going to her lower back to support her as she stood. She held out her arms expectantly to Jo. “Well? You aren’t _actually_ struck dumb, are you? That’d mean that Sebastian was right about something, and I have it on good authority that the Maker will return to the world before that happens.”

Sebastian put a hand over his heart, pretending to swoon against the back of the couch. “My love, you wound me,” he said, but his eyes were sparkling merrily and he was grinning.

Jo, for her part, stood stricken, almost overwhelmed by the tumult of emotions in her heart- grief and guilt and joy and relief all vying for control, and as Siobhan patiently held out her arms to her, waiting for her, she blurted out the only thing that seemed safe. “You’re still wearing the lipstick,” she said awkwardly, staring at the bright glossy pink that seemed almost out of place with the creamy white and gold of her gown. 

In their first year in Kirkwall, when money had been ridiculously hard to come by while they worked off their debt, she’d caught Bethany and Siobhan gushing together as they quietly perused an apothecarist’s stall in the Lowtown market; Jo had never been one for makeup herself, too uncomfortable in her own skin to consider the brightly coloured paints and powders right for her. But Bethany had always delighted in the little extravagance, making her own tinctures back in Lothering with the flowers they collected on the fringes of the Wilds, and Siobhan had been born to a comfortable life as the only child of a magistrate in Southron Hills, and little things like makeup had never been an unaffordable luxury for her like they were now. 

She’d watched them both dabbing colours on the back of their hands, oohing and ahhing to each other in delight before sadly moving on, and her heart had broken; after dinner that night she’d gone back to the docks alone, to Athenril’s back alley office, and she’d begged her for extra work. Jobs that she’d previously put her foot down on and refused she took without hesitation, keeping her head down so she wouldn’t see the satisfied smirk on Athenril’s face to see her grovelling and desperate. For weeks she’d run the extra jobs and routes without complaint, catching a few hours sleep when she could, doing her best to keep her additional activities from her family without dying of sleep deprivation. 

It’d been worth it however, when she’d finally scraped together the coin to buy a tiny pot of purple powder for Bethany, and the equally tiny stick of bright pink paint for Siobhan. The gobsmacked look of delight and dismay on their faces, torn between glee at the gift and distress at knowing what such little luxuries had to have cost her. She’d slept for two days straight after that, and her sisters- one by blood and one by oath- had carefully deflected Athenril’s queries and lied through their teeth pretending that Jo was still running jobs with them, so as not to upset their fragile arrangement with the smuggler. 

The bright pink had become Siobhan’s signature look, throughout all their years together in Kirkwall, even when their fortunes had turned and they’d been able to shop at the High Town boutiques for fancy Orlesian or Rivaini cosmetics. 

And she was still wearing it as Princess of Starkhaven. 

Siobhan looked startled, one hand going to her lips as if it hadn’t even crossed her mind, and then she laughed. “I _am_ ,” she said, and then wiggled her fingers impatiently in her direction. “Am I entitled to a hug after coming so far with a fat belly, or shall I just stand here like an awkward scarecrow with my arms out?”

That same smile, the same silly little jokes- as if she hadn’t all but abandoned them years earlier, as if she hadn’t turned tail and fled from Kirkwall the moment it had been safe to do so. As if she still loved her as fiercely now as she had back then, and nothing between them had changed. 

It was all a little bit too much for her. 

She felt her face scrunch up with the inevitable onslaught of tears, and saw the brief flash of concern on Siobhan’s face before she lunged for her open arms, hiding her face against her shoulder as the weeping took her. Siobhan’s arms were gentle as they came up around her, a soft laugh against her ear as she smoothed her hands down her back.

“Hey, now,” she said warningly, her telltale wobble in her voice, “you’re not allowed to make the pregnant woman emotional- I start crying now and it won’t stop for _days_.” 

“Is this a waffle emergency?” Sebastian said in an ominous tone behind them, surprising a laugh from both of them. “If it’s a waffle emergency, I’m going to need unhindered access to the kitchen-”

“That was _one_ time,” Siobhan said with a laugh, wiping her eyes delicately to clear away the tears as Jo reluctantly eased away from the hug, smearing at her face with the back of her hand in a far less graceful fashion. “One time, and I was hungover, and you _never_ let me forget it.”

“And why would I? It was adorably hilarious, and a man needs some little amusements to tease his wife with.”

There was such easy affection between them, friendship that had blossomed into love over the course of years, and Jo tried not to feel the pang of shame at having fled from this. She put her hand hesitantly against Siobhan’s stomach, feeling the gentle curve of her belly. “How long...?”

Siobhan was beaming. “Five months,” she said, running her hands over her stomach with a pleased expression on her face. “Five long and torturous months with everyone in Starkhaven in a state of near panic every time I so much as think of doing something for myself.”

“Now, love,” Sebastian said patiently.

He couldn’t see her roll her eyes and grin at Jo. “I’m surprised you haven’t resorted to cutting up my food for me at meal times,” she said loudly, directing the comment over her shoulder. “You’d think everyone in the Free Marches had suffered collective amnesia and conveniently forgotten that time I spent running riot in Kirkwall with the infamous Champion herself.”

“Oh, we’ve not forgotten- that’s why we’re so determined to coddle you. If we let you have your way you’d be as big as the side of a barn and still down in the lower city trying to help refugees build houses.”

“And what is so terrible about that?”

Jo’s head was spinning, and she let her hand fall away from Siobhan’s belly. She felt like an intruder in a private moment, something she should not be privy to; Siobhan, ever perceptive, seemed to notice immediately, and the smile on her face eased away, replaced by a look of concern.

“Jo?” 

Sebastian was only a heartbeat behind her, his voice far kinder than she had been expecting. “Jo,” he said, almost teasingly, and she looked over at him. He turned his hands up in a shrugging gesture. “Why so uneasy? We were all friends once, were we not?”

She twisted her fingers together miserably. “I... we were friends, yes,” she said softly. “I do worry that was a long time ago, though.”

“It was only four years, Jo. And in the meantime, your sister lives quite comfortably a day’s ride from Starkhaven, and Siobhan has made the city into a place you would be proud of-”

“ _We_ have made the city into a place to be proud of,” Siobhan said pointedly, easing herself back down onto the settee with far more elegance than Jo would have expected from a pregnant woman. “And Bethany does extraordinary things for the mages of the Free Marches, so much so that I barely recognise the young girl I met in Gwaren.”

“Meanwhile I have scurried beneath my grandmother’s skirts, hiding behind her name in plain sight and hoping that no one will put two and two together,” Jo said with a touch of bitterness in her voice, drooping backwards into the plump comforter angled to face the couch they sat on. 

Sebastian and Siobhan exchanged a look, the meaning abundantly clear to her, and she looked away, pretending she hadn’t noticed. She knew she was being abysmal, both as a host and as a friend, but it all just felt so raw, more painful than she’d expected it to feel.

Siobhan cleared her throat. “You said in your last letter that nobody had recognised you yet, but I didn’t know whether that was just your usual optimism or whether it was the truth,” she said quietly. “I mean, we hear news every other week or so, of sightings of the Champion from every corner of Thedas, so we assumed...”

“We assumed you were safe, if nothing else,” Sebastian finished when Siobhan trailed off helplessly. 

Her mouth twisted wryly. “Nobody associates Lady Gottschalk the Younger with Jo Hawke,” she said pointedly. “There’s something remarkably freeing about that- it’s... it’s hard to explain.”

His smile was gentle. “Jo, who do you think it is you talk to? I went from Prince of Starkhaven to Brother Sebastian, and for a time, it was the most liberating experience in my life.”

“But?”

“But that does not mean that Prince Sebastian of Starkhaven ceased to be- nor does it mean that there was no place for him in the world.”

Jo snorted, blowing upwards so that her fringe flopped against her forehead when she stopped. “Jo Hawke isn’t me anymore- she’s an idea. A concept. The world has taken Jo Hawke and decided what she is and what she means far beyond what I ever could have achieved.”

“Do you honestly believe that?” he asked, leaning back with a curious expression on his face. “Do you honestly feel that nothing you did, nothing you fought for, has endured in the face of the stories about you?”

“I couldn’t even _save_ Kirkwall, Sebastian,” she said. “I couldn’t stop the war, I couldn’t even stop myself from being a nice person long enough to realise that Anders was bullshitting me, and hundreds of people paid for my naivety with their _lives_. And then I wasn’t strong enough to do the right thing, and it cost me your friendship.”

“Do you think I’d be here if it had truly cost you my friendship?”

“I don’t even know why you _are_ here,” she said pointedly, looking from one to the other. Siobhan held her gaze, while Sebastian glanced away guiltily a moment later. “You didn’t send word you were coming, which to me implies you felt you would be turned away at the door if you sent warning ahead. Do you think so poorly of me that you thought you had to ambush me just to speak to me?”

“I have reached out to you as gently as I can these last few years, Jojo,” Siobhan said, her tone firm but her voice soft. The use of her old nickname made her wince, shame bubbling in her stomach as she looked away guiltily. “I have never pushed you, never imposed upon you, but it has broken my heart each and every day not having you to talk to and laugh with and hold. You are my best friend, and I will not let my child grow without having their aunt in their life.” 

Jo let out a small sound of distress, her lip wobbling treacherously before she looked away hastily, her hand covering the lower half of her face. It didn’t really hide the tears that spilled over her lashes onto her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Siobhan,” she whispered, swallowing repeatedly to try and hold back the storm of tears within her. “I just... wanted you to be safe. To live a life without me constantly endangering it.”

“Don’t you think I’m entitled to make that decision for myself? And don’t you think that perhaps it’s a little dramatic to consider that my life will only ever be in danger with you?” There was a fire in her eyes that she recognised all too well. “I mean, unless you are responsible for the various lords and ladies of Starkhaven who have resisted our commitment to social change, or the mage extremists who consider our stance to be too neutral, or the constant flow of Seekers and Chantry officials who criticize our leniency on matters of faith? In which case I commend you, your influence reaches far further than I could ever have dreamed.”

“Alright, alright,” she said crossly, her voice shaking as she wiped her cheeks. “I suppose I deserved that.”

“You are hopelessly maudlin and self deprecating, my love. I let you lick your wounds and hide for the last few years, but my patience has its limits, and I miss you.”

“And we were worried about you,” Sebastian said pointedly. “With Divine Justinia’s conclave only a month away, we thought-”

“We thought there was the chance you might do something stupid, out of guilt,” Siobhan interrupted.

She felt her face burn. “I _never_ condoned what Anders did in Kirkwall,” she began hotly, but Sebastian had anticipated her. 

“We know that,” he said, and then let out a soft _oomph_ noise when Siobhan elbowed him. “Alright, after I had some time to calm down and process the events of that night, I realised I grossly misjudged you, and for that I apologize.”

“You had a right to be angry,” she said softly, the old pain aching just like an ugly old scar. “I never thought you were in the wrong for your anger.”

“But we were worried,” Siobhan continued. “We know Varric is at the conclave, and we can’t tell whether he’s there willingly or-”

“Or as bait,” Sebastian finished grimly. “My contacts were not able to get us a clear understanding of his situation.”

“And whether the intention was for them to lure you in to arrest you, or whether it was just to engage you in dialogue- given that the rebellion is so tied to your name-”

Jo groaned.

“For them to resort to using Varric, it didn’t seem like a gamble worth taking, even for a friend,” Siobhan said, her voice gentle. “So we wanted to check that you weren’t about to dash off to play the hero without thinking.”

“I don’t...” Siobhan and Sebastian pinned her with twin looks of pointed disbelief, and she shrank back into the chair. “Alright, fine, that might be a problem of mine.”

“ _Might?_ ” Sebastian muttered under his breath. 

“I had no plans to attend the Conclave,” she said, rubbing at her eyes. “Of course we’d heard about it, and grandmother and I briefly entertained the idea of sending an emissary, but...” She shrugged. “It’s not my place to say- I’m not a mage, it should never have been my voice that people listened to. It makes me uncomfortable that I’m still the one people think of when they talk about the rebellion- it should never have been me.”

Siobhan climbed back to her feet and waddled over to her chair, perching herself on the cushioned arm with a little difficulty and wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “I know, Jojo,” she said softly. “I know you didn’t.”

They had silence for a moment, heavy with the memories they all carried from Kirkwall, and then Jo cleared her throat, her hand settled comfortably on Siobhan’s knee. “I have to say, actually- I’m surprised you aren’t attending, Sebastian,” she said. “What with the things I’ve been hearing about the religious heresies brewing in Starkhaven these days.”

He laughed, apparently delighted. “I’ve not made any friends amongst the clergy in Val Royeaux, it’s true,” he said. “Apparently, expressing a determination to avoid the sort of deadlock we experienced in Kirkwall for three years and to ensure there are failsafes in place is blasphemy- trying to engage the Chantry on secular topics and the need for community input makes me a filthy heretic.”

Jo blinked in surprise. “You’ve changed,” she said, glancing up at Siobhan before looking back to Sebastian. “This sort of... determination, self assuredness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this comfortable.”

He shrugged, a smile playing over his lips. “What can I say? I take my inspiration from two very strong willed women in my life.”

“What he _means_ to say,” Siobhan said, rolling her eyes fondly, “is that we all lived through years of watching the Chantry interfere needlessly with secular politics, as well as an utterly disastrous approach to mages and qunari, and we can’t condone that happening again. Faith must guide us, but it must not control us.”

“Which is why I’ll not be attending the conclave,” Sebastian said. “As important as it is to see an end to this war, I’ll not sacrifice the safety and progress of Starkhaven to achieve that- not when it risks Bethany’s sanctuary, either.”

Jo smiled gently, a knot she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge slowly unwinding from around her heart. “Thank you,” she said. 

“I do it as much for her as I do for you, Jo- I believe in what she’s doing, and I believe in her methods. Maker only knows what would become of those children in the midst of a war, with no appropriate guidance or supervision.” 

Siobhan clapped her hands together. “But enough of all this serious political talk,” she said brightly. “I didn’t come all this way just to sit through more droll diplomatic negotiations, I could have stayed at home for that. We’re none of us going to the conclave, and we’ve a lot of catching up to do.”

Jo laughed, leaning into her side. “We do at that,” she said softly.

“Did I hear them calling you Grandmaster? I thought your grandmother was still the Grandmaster? Josefina, if you have been keeping exciting news from me-”

“Well it’s not like you told me you were pregnant!”

Her heart felt light in a way it hadn’t in years- she had Siobhan again, Bethany was safe and happy and forging her own path, and soon the war would draw to a close at the conclave. She was no longer Jo Hawke, unwilling champion of a thousand different causes. 

Things were finally looking up.


	2. Wycome

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rees previously featured in [What's In a Name](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2173308/chapters/4754619) but is canonically not the Inquisitor- the chapter linked does explain her nightmares in more detail, however.
> 
> Finglas Lavellan belongs to [Emily](http://emilykcomicsmith.tumblr.com) and serves as Clan Lavellan's Second

**9:41 Dragon**   
_Delta of the Minanter River, north of Wycome_

_Three weeks to the Conclave_

Elgar’nan battled the sun, and no matter how she screamed for them to stop, no matter how she tried to drag them apart and point out how the world suffered and burned for their squabbles, she could not move them.

The world burned, and she felt her skin char and melt, falling to her knees in the ashes of a thousand cities, and wept.

Except-

“Rees? By the Dread Wolf, Rees, wake _up_.” There was a hand on her shoulder, shaking her, and suddenly she was not kneeling in ashes, but wrapped absurdly tight in her bedroll, the heat merely from the near feverish state she’d worked herself into and not from the nightmarish closeness of the sun. In the dim light, she could see the soft and familiar interior of the aravel she shared with Finglas, veilfire flickering softly in the lantern and casting misshapen shadows across the room. 

Finglas himself was leaning over her, hair dishevelled and shirtless, and once he saw she was awake he sat back on his heels. “Well, maybe you didn’t wake the _whole_ camp this time,” he said, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. 

Thérèse groaned, flopping back against the pillow and covering her face with her arm. “Ir abelas, Finglas,” she said, wincing at how deep her voice sounded, still rough from sleep. She swallowed a few times, stretching her chin up and clearing her throat before trying again. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” her voice a little softer on the second attempt. 

“You never do, lethallan,” he said wearily. He put his hand onto her forehead. “Creators, you’re burning up.”

She tried to swat his hand away. “I’m fine, Finglas,” she said, already knowing the argument was weak. 

“I’m getting Deshanna,” he said, scrambling to his feet and heading for the curtain that hung over the aravel entrance. Thérèse groaned and rolled onto her stomach, trying to kick her legs free of the constricting blanket cocoon she’d wrapped herself in. 

She’d been hoping the dreams would stop now that she’d undergone the ritual of vallaslin; she’d heard Mythal’s call and accepted her guidance, but still the spirits and the visions came to her. What message was she supposed to take away from this all, this constant bombardment of violent imagery and painful emotional upheaval?

It was almost enough to make her wonder whether she should have pledged herself to Falon’din after all. At least the dead were simple enough in their demands. 

There was a hint of hushed conversation beyond the curtain, and she turned her head towards the entrance. 

Keeper Deshanna appeared in the doorway, a robe wrapped lightly around her against the temperate night air as she climbed into the aravel and her dark hair long and loose around her shoulders, the streaks of grey across her head like the paths of shooting stars; she smiled sadly as her eyes fell on her. “Thérèse,” she said, the burr of her accent making it out as _teh-rais_ rather than the Orlesian pronunciation her city-born father had intended. To be honest, after so many years abroad now, she much preferred the way the clan called her name; it gave her a measure of separation from her past, from things that hurt her. “Ir abelas, da’len. I thought we had a handle on this.”

Thérèse sighed, fighting the urge to hide her face in the pillow. “Ir tel’him, Keeper,” she said, weariness seeping into her now. The dreams exhausted her so much, physically and emotionally, and she knew come the morning she would feel utterly dreadful. 

Deshanna knelt beside the bed, taking her hand in hers; behind her, Finglas clambered back into the aravel and flopped face down onto his bed. “Tell me what you saw,” she said gently, her dark skin making even Thérèse’s brown fingers seem bland in comparison. 

“The same as always. Endless wastes, the world burnt to cinders.” She swallowed, annoyed at herself for being close to tears and letting her voice crack. “Elgar’nan, at war with the sun.”

“Did Mythal speak to you?”

“Not this time,” she said, closing her eyes as the first tear slipped onto her cheek. After a moment, she felt Deshanna’s fingers on her skin, brushing away the tear and smoothing back her hair. 

“Emma’asha,” she said quietly, “can you tell me anything that stood out to you in this vision?” 

Frustration welled up in her, like always. “It was the _same_ ,” she said, almost petulantly, and from the other side of the aravel Finglas snorted in amusement. She lifted a sleep tousled head from the pillow to glare at him, and he made an exaggerated show of innocence. 

Deshanna cleared her throat pointedly, and they both wilted sheepishly. 

“In what direction did they fight, da’len?” she asked quietly.

“How am I supposed to tell directions when the sun itself was in the midst of a fight to the death with a god?”

“Does a First not know how to read the whims of the Fade? Anyone would think this was your first vision, da’len.” 

She flopped down against the pillow in exhaustion, well aware that she’d earned the gentle chastisement. “There were mountains,” she said. “I was lying on the mountainside. Everything was burned to ash- there were no trees, no grass. The mountains stretched as far as I could see in either direction.”

“Sounds like the Anderfels,” Finglas said; when Deshanna and Thérèse both cast him withering glares, he said “ _What?_ Mountains, no vegetation, it sounds like the Blightlands.”

“Nothing in the Fade is ever simple, da’mi,” Deshanna said, calling him by the nickname he had earned for the endless collection of small knives he carried for his herbology studies. “And visions, even less so. The Fade is a poor reconstruction of our world, riddled with inconsistencies, and it is rarely the most obvious answer.” She turned back to Thérèse. “Could you see the Black City? Any stars or constellations?”

She scrubbed wearily at her face. “I could... feel it? It was there, but it was too bright for me to see.” She scrunched her eyes up as she concentrated. “There was... an absence, in the sky. Like a void? It might have been where the sun escaped from...”

She felt Deshanna’s interest sharpen noticeably. “A void? Are you sure?”

Blinking in surprise, Thérèse said “It’s the best word I can think of for it, yes.”

Deshanna breathed out slowly, settling back on her knees. “Interesting,” she said softly, her fingers brushing softly against the back of Thérèse’s hand where it rested on the pillow. 

“What’s interesting?” Finglas said, his voice still a little sulky. 

“There is an old story,” Deshanna said, considering her words carefully, “of how Elgar’nan the All-Father battled his father the sun-”

“Everybody knows the story of how Elgar’nan battled the sun, Keeper.”

She paused rather pointedly, and turned slowly to face him; he quite visibly shrank back against the headboard. “By all means, da’mi,” she said pleasantly, “would you like to tell this story?”

“No, Keeper,” he said instantly.

She smiled. “So kind of you,” she murmured. “Like with most of our history, the true telling has been lost amongst the years, passed down in ever smaller fragments with each new age. But, as with most stories that have grown into myth, they begin with a kernel of truth- and for this tale, it is the tarasy’lan te’las.”

“The...” Thérèse frowned, working backwards through the word. “Something about... the location of the sky?”

“No, it’s something about _people_ of the sky,” Finglas said. They both looked at Deshanna, who was smiling serenely. “Isn’t it?”

“It means ‘ _place where the sky was held back_ ’,” she said. “It was a holy place for our people, in the time before humans, where Elgar’nan saw the jealousy of the sun and the pain it caused to the world, and he climbed to the highest place in the world and hid himself in the shadows. When his father passed overhead, enraged and petty and jealous, Elgar’nan leapt from his hiding place and tore him from the sky, leaving a gaping hole in the heavens while they fought.”

“Until Mythal intervened and convinced them to find peace,” Thérèse said, her voice cracking a little despite her best efforts. She cleared her throat, her heart beating uncomfortably fast in her chest; she had seen this story play out a hundred times when she closed her eyes, the visions haunting her for over a year now. 

“Indeed, da’len,” Deshanna said gently. “Elgar’nan, long wearied by the battle, helped his father to climb back towards the heavens, where the sun took his rightful place in the sky once more. But the place where they climbed was forever marked, touched by the battles of gods, and it was tarasy’lan te’las. The place where the sky was held back.”

Silence hung heavy in the aravel with the close of her tale, and Thérèse closed her eyes, far too exhausted to care for whatever lesson Deshanna was weaving for them now. That was probably a poor attitude to take as a First, but in the early hours of the morning after a nightmare vision, she didn’t see how she was supposed to have a different opinion. 

“So,” Finglas said slowly, “this place... tarasy’lan te’las, it’s a real place? Or is it just, like, some sort of metaphorical way of saying we _all_ have the strength inside of us to change?”

Thérèse couldn’t help it- she snorted into the pillow, trying her best to hide her laughter and doing a poor job of it. She heard Deshanna sigh, the weary sort of resignation from one who has long accepted the flippancy of her charges. “It’s a real place, da’mi,” she said. “Or it was, long ago. It was a holy place for us, a place where Elgar’nan nearly broke the world apart in his rage, and where Mythal implored him to set things right again.”

“It’s in the Anderfels,” Finglas said knowledgeably. Thérèse cracked open an eye and watched as he counted his proof of on his fingers. “Mount Ambrosia in the Hunterhorns is the tallest mountain in Thedas, Thérèse keeps seeing dry dusty mountains in her visions, where else would it be?” 

“Except that many of the sites most sacred to Mythal lay in the south,” Deshanna countered. 

“Those that we _remember_ ,” Finglas said, apparently determined to win the argument. “We have lost so much of our history, what’s to say that our belief that Mythal’s most important sites were in the south is merely a result of our cultural loss?”

“Da’mi, are you _really_ trying to argue with me in the middle of the night?”

He winked outrageously. “Keeper, I believe I am.”

Thérèse watched as Deshanna closed her eyes. “Creators spare me from overzealous apprentices,” she murmured, sighing as she adjusted the robe across her shoulders. “Regardless of what _personal interpretations_ certain people might hold, there was a holy place dedicated to tarasy’lan te’las in the south, and so that would make the most logical location to be...?”

“In the Frostbacks,” Thérèse said wearily. 

“And what do we know to be taking place in the Frostbacks in the next few months?”

“The shemlen conclave, about the mage war.”

“Indeed.” She paused, whether for dramatic effect or whether to collect her thoughts, Thérèse couldn’t say. “Which is why you will both be attending the conclave.”

“ _What?_ ” they both said in unison, Finglas half rising from his bed. 

“There’s no need to shout,” Deshanna said calmly. “You both heard me quite clearly.”

Finglas was the first to recover his voice. “But you can’t be _serious_ ,” he said, running a hand anxiously through his coppery red hair. 

“Do you suppose this is a matter I would jest about, lethallin?”

“I-” He swallowed down whatever argument he’d been about to make, slumping back onto the bed and letting his head drop. “No, Keeper.”

Thérèse fumbled into a sitting position, keeping the blankets wrapped around her for modesty’s sake, since she couldn’t hide her squarish shoulders and awkward figure in her night gown. “Creators, why in the Void would you possibly want us to attend a human ceasefire? Their war does not concern us, let them grind one another into the dust.”

“You trusted your visions to know that your path lay with Mythal, da’len,” Deshanna said. “Enough so that you did not even hesitate to pledge yourself to her when it came time for your vallaslin ceremony. Do you now see those same visions as being without meaning, despite their continued imposition on you?”

“I...” She felt frustrated tears pricking at her eyes. “I have no sensible answer for that.”

Deshanna reached out and took her hand in hers, the gentle roughness of her callouses rubbing against her fingers. “This is not a condemnation of your talents, lethallan,” she said softly. “It has been my honour and my privilege to teach you these last fifteen years, but it is clear to me that your feet are intended for another path. There is no shame in that.”

She sniffed and wiped at her eyes with her free hand, the blanket slipping a little from her shoulders. “I can’t just _leave_ ,” she said, aware that she sounded pitifully petulant. 

“Caelneth is old enough now and stable enough in her magic that she can step up to begin learning the duties of a First,” Deshanna said. “And Linnor has been trying to hide his burgeoning magical skills for about three months now, Creators bless him. Caelneth is an excellent healer, and will be able to hold the position until Linnor is old enough to surpass her.” She chuckled. “In the space of but one generation, we have such a blessed overabundance of magic. The Creators truly have blessed us.” 

“But why both of us?” Finglas said, clearly still struggling to absorb the news. “Rees is the one who had the vision, why do I have to go?”

Deshanna turned to him slowly, and Thérèse didn’t have to be on the receiving end of that look to know he was pushing her patience. “Why, Finglas, here I was thinking you did not have the ken for the role of First.”

His eyes went impossibly large. “I- what? I didn’t say I wanted to be First-”

“And yet if Thérèse leaves us at the behest of her visions, the Second must become the First,” Deshanna said, a coy smile on her face. “As the clan Second, you would be expected to take up the duties and responsibilities of the First- shall I arrange for the ceremony to take place tomorrow, or do you need a few days to settle into the role?”

Finglas quite visibly wilted back against the wall of the aravel. “By the Dread Wolf, _no!_ Are you daft?”

“Is that a no, da’mi?”

Thérèse looked across the small space to him, and held his gaze; the resignation she felt in the pit of her stomach matched the woeful misery on his face, and even though in normal circumstances she might have laughed at him for his unfailing ability to stick his foot in it, this was one occasion where they were both well and truly stuck together. 

“Finglas doesn’t need to give up his position,” she whispered. “It’s my vision, after all.”

“ _Damn it_ , Rees, I don’t need you going all bleeding heart on my behalf,” he said crossly, and in the gloom she could see him clench his hands into fists in the blankets. “If you go off by yourself, who’s gonna make you your tonics? If you think I’m just gonna let you walk off into the sunset without so much as a by-your-leave-”

“I can make my own tonics.”

“Rees you can’t tell the difference between powdered elfroot and desiccated deathroot, you will be one day out of camp upside down in a ditch with blue lips and flies buzzing around your open mouth, don’t lie to me.”

She bit her lip and looked away, not sure whether to laugh in amusement at the dramatic image or cry at his fervent dedication to her. “But, your family-”

“Are a bunch of overzealous hunters with far too much muscle mass and not enough brains who will not even miss me once I’m over the hill, and besides that’s missing the most important fact of all which is that _you are my family_ , Rees.”

“I can’t ask you to follow me all the way to Ferelden.”

“And you also can’t stop me from following you,” he said triumphantly, and then paused. “That sounded a little less stalkerish in my head.”

Deshanna cleared her throat. “So I take it you’re in agreement?” she asked, a small smile playing over her lips.

Thérèse looked at Finglas and he shrugged. “You’re not leaving without me,” he said, waggling his finger at her. “So I guess we’re going to Ferelden.”

She smiled sadly, just a slight curve to the corner of her mouth. “I guess we are.”

It only took a day to make the arrangements, Deshanna calling the clan together the very next morning to announce the touch of fate upon the two of them. Caelneth took the news of her abrupt elevation in the clan with far more grace than either of them had managed the evening before, her eyes impossibly wide but her mouth clamped shut as she shuffled nervously beside the Keeper. Linnor was less enthused, shrieking and clinging to his mother’s leg, wailing miserably when Deshanna tried to coax him up to stand beside her. In his defence, he was only eight, and Finglas hadn’t been particularly thrilled to leave the comfort of his family’s aravel when he’d been a child either. 

And speaking of family... Thérèse tried not to feel the tug of grief and envy in her heart as Finglas’ older siblings tackled him, ignoring his squawks of protest as they howled with laughter. The two of them were as boisterous and brawny as Finglas was twiggy, and had taken after their mother Gheyna, the current Master of the Hunt, in both temperament and size; Finglas, for his part, seemed to have accidentally taken after the clan’s gangly adolescent halla instead. 

“Oooh, he’s going off to be a grand adventurer,” Carhern said with a cackle as he kept Finglas pinned to the ground. “He’s going to be sung of in tales in ages to come.”

“I’ve got a good start,” Kahris said, grinning as she sat firmly on his legs. She and Carhern both had the same outrageously copper coloured hair their brother had been blessed with, but they both had the elaborate vallaslin of Andruil inked across their faces in vivid red to honour their mother and their role as hunters in the clan. “‘ _Oh, the elvhen gods have gone to ground, but that won’t keep our Finglas down-_ ’”

“ _Creators_ , woman, are you writing a song or are you trying to attract a halla mate with all that honking?”

“Mm, good to know some things run in the family,” Thérèse said under her breath, looking pointedly at Finglas as he wheezed for breath under the weight of his siblings.

“What?” Kahris asked, lurching to her feet with a gleeful grin on her face. “What’s this?”

“It’s nothing!” Finglas yelled, wriggling fiercely to try and get out from under Carhern. 

“Clearly it’s not _nothing_ ,” Kahris said, “or else you wouldn’t be panicking like the time you got caught in the hunter’s snare and ended up hanging from your foot from the treetops for five hours.”

“It would have only been one hour if you’d just _cut me down_.”

“It’s nothing,” Thérèse said with a faint tugging at the corner of her mouth as she cut off the old argument before it could get started again. “Just an old inside joke.”

Carhern rolled backwards off of Finglas, flopping onto the ground beside him. “Aww, that’s no fun,” he said, smirking as Finglas scrambled to his feet with a scowl, brushing himself off with haughty gestures. “You’re going away, it’s not like we’re going to be around to tease you anyway. You should just tell us, as a parting gift.”

Thérèse rolled her eyes good naturedly. “Like I’m going to alienate the only brother I have left,” she said. “Especially when he’s the only company I’m going to have for weeks. And _definitely_ especially when I don’t even have a chance to say goodbye to Leon.”

Kahris clapped her on the shoulder before pulling her in far too tightly for a hug. “Don’t worry yourself, da’len,” she said, squeezing her tight. Thérèse fought the urge to gasp feebly and struggle against the ruthlessly fierce hug- Kahris underestimated her own strength about as regularly as she overestimated Thérèse’s. At the last arlathvhen, there was only one other hunter from a Nevarran clan who’d been able to draw Kahris’ long bow, out of all the clans and all the hunters in attendance. She’d been immeasurably smug about that for months afterwards. “We’ll keep watch over Leon’s vallasdahlen until you return.”

“That’s right, da’vhenan,” Carhern said, coming in to stand at her other shoulder and leaning casually on it. “You won’t even recognise him, he’ll be fifty feet tall and have a dozen squirrels and another dozen birds nests. He’ll be _glorious_.”

She sniffed and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, abruptly miserable at the thought of leaving him. “I... I appreciate that,” she said quietly. “Tell him I’ll miss him?” 

Kahris leaned close and planted a kiss firmly on her forehead. “You know you’ve got a better chance of actually speaking to him than we do, da’falon'din.” 

Finglas made a scoffing noise. “It doesn’t _work_ like that, you know,” he said loftily, squawking in annoyance when Carhern reached up and ruffled his hair.

“Take care of yourself, da’mi,” he said, grinning roguishly. “And take care of each other, okay? We need our First and our Second back.”

A hand came to rest on Thérèse’s shoulder, and she looked up into the face of Gheyna, Finglas’ indomitable mother and clan matriarch. Gheyna’s hair had once been bold and brassy, the same as her children, but her years as a mother figure to a good half the clan had turned her locks silver instead. She was Master of the Hunt, her vallaslin etched into her face along with her laugh lines, and the only hunter in the clan who could outshoot her was her own daughter. 

She had been the only mother Thérèse had known these past fifteen years, for as much as she adored Deshanna, they had always worked first and foremost as teacher and student, rather than mother and daughter. Thérèse knew her excessively introverted ways made her come across as prickly sometimes, and her affinity with the dead had never made her a sunny child, but Gheyna had taken her oddities in her stride, and had embraced her with all the warmth and fuss that she gave to her own children. 

Thérèse felt her face crumple, and Gheyna opened her arms to her without a word; there were tears burning at her eyes, grief closing tight around her throat, but Gheyna wrapped her arms tight around her and murmured soothing sounds into her hair, hiding her face from the world. 

“You make sure that boy of mine doesn’t get himself on the wrong end of a shem blade,” she whispered, hands rubbing circles on her back. “And I mean that _both_ ways.”

“Mamae!” Finglas’ horrified shriek made the both of them laugh, Thérèse tucking her face against Gheyna’s shoulder as she giggled under her breath.

“There’s my girl,” Gheyna said. “Go out on a smile, eh?”

She pulled away, holding her at arm’s length, and her expression grew serious. “Make sure you keep warm, because it’s daft cold in the south, and if you need help and can’t make your way home, head for the south east. The Hero of Ferelden gave our people a city after the Blight, and they’ll see you safely home if you seek their aid.”

“The fabled lost city of Vhenmahvir,” Kahris said dramatically, swooning against Carhern. 

“It’s a daft name,” Carhern said, catching her with a look of disgust on his face.

“ _You’re_ a daft name.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense!”

“Your _face_ doesn’t make any sense.”

“Pay no mind to those idiots,” Gheyna said, smiling fondly despite her words. “Most of the shem will call it Gwaren, and I have no doubt a lot of the people still call it that too, even with their lofty attempts to rebuild it in our image. Ask for directions to Vhenmahvir, or Gwaren, or the Brecilian Passage, and you’ll find our people.”

Finglas made a scoffing noise. “I am not walking all the way from one side of Ferelden to the other just to find someone who will absolutely overcharge us for the help but will do so in the name of elvhen solidarity.”

Gheyna shared a pointed look with Thérèse. “Make sure to take your tonics,” she continued, as if Finglas hadn’t interrupted her, “and makes sure he makes them proper for you. Smack him over the ear if he makes them taste bad.”

“ _Mamae!_ ” 

“Make sure you eat. Creators only know I’ve tried to get you both looking like more than skin and bones, but it just doesn’t take- you’re both little furnaces.”

“We’ll be fine, Gheyna,” Thérèse said softly, her heart already aching at the thought of having to leave them all behind. 

“Hush now- I know you’ll be fine. Just indulge an old lady while she turns her little halla loose into the world.”

For the most part, the rest of the clan had settled into a casual semi circle around them, watching them as they prepared to leave. The mood wasn’t exactly festive, but there was an excitable energy in the air, enough that it prickled along her skin and made her shiver. 

Thérèse slung her satchel over her shoulder and adjusted her waist cinch once it was settled, tugging it into place until she felt comfortable again. Her staff was thrust into her peripheral, and she smiled faintly at Finglas in thanks, his face so unpleasantly pale that he looked like he was about to lose his breakfast all over her shoes. “I’m ready,” he said, chin jutting out defiantly even though his voice cracked slightly on the words. 

She took the staff from him, the wood warm under her fingers and the veins of opal running through the shaft brightened subtly at her touch. Glancing up at him from beneath long lashes, she swallowed down the lump of fear sitting in her throat. “I am too.”

He attempted to loop his own bag casually over his shoulder, clearly trying to look very suave and calm but only succeeding in half choking himself when he underestimated the weight of the bags. “ _Elgar’nan_ ,” he spluttered, wheezing as he moved the strap as far away from his neck as possible on his skinny shoulders. “I don’t see why we couldn’t have a halla to help us carry everything-”

“Since when have hallas ever been pack animals?” Thérèse asked, looking for all the world like she was just heading out for an afternoon stroll, and not a cross-continental trek to a foreign land at the behest of a vision.

He poked his tongue out at her. “Or, if you’ve got any _better_ ideas, like summoning some friendly spirits to help us...”

Thérèse looked at him pointedly. “But it doesn’t _work_ like that, you know,” she said, parroting his words from earlier. 

“Fine. Mock me relentlessly- see if I help you carry your bags when we’re waist deep in snow drifts in the wilds of Ferelden.”

“Well, why are we going to get lost in the snow in the wilds of Ferelden? Why would I be stupid enough to let you have the map in the first place?”

Behind them, Keeper Deshanna quite pointedly cleared her throat, and they turned to her sheepishly while she crossed her arms and shook her head in amusement. “Do you intend to stand around and bicker all day whilst the sunlight escapes you, or do you think it likely you’ll actually leave today?”

“You can’t rush a _vision quest_ , Keeper,” Finglas said, doing his best to sound scandalized by the very suggestion. 

Deshanna rolled her eyes good naturedly. “Follow the river along to the coast, and turn south for Wycombe,” she said gesturing to the south east, over their shoulders. “From there, you can find passage on a caravan to Hercinia, or Ostwick, and you can make sail for Amaranthine from there.”

A silence fell over the clearing after her words, and Thérèse shifted uneasily from foot to foot, uncomfortable being the centre of attention even for her own clan. “Well,” she said slowly, forcing herself to raise her voice, “I guess that’s everything then.”

“Yep,” Finglas said instantly, his voice a little higher pitched than normal. “Definitely everything. Definitely... time to go.”

Deshanna smiled gently at them, clasping her hands before her chest and bowing her head. “Dareth shiral, da’vhenans,” she said loudly, raising her voice so that the whole clan could hear her. “May Mythal guide your steps, and may Sylaise lead you on paths to warm hearths each night.”

“And may the Dread Wolf never catch your scent!” The children of the clan burst into a flurry of giggles as Carhern rolled into the centre of the clearing making terribly exaggerated howling noises and pretending to snuffle at the ground like a wolf.

Thérèse and Finglas looked at each other, the weight of inevitability hanging over them, and laughed. “There’s no time like the present to get started,” she said softly, holding out her hand to him. He didn’t even hesitate as he reached out to slide his fingers through hers, squeezing tightly. 

She was kind enough not to mention that he was shaking, and he did the same for her. 

They gestured with their staffs, a vague attempt at waving, and then turned their backs on the circle of aravels and the familiar sounds and faces of the clan, and began the long walk in pursuit of Thérèse’s visions.

The clan was not even out of hearing range behind them before Finglas leaned a little closer and muttered “So, like, you know how to get to Ferelden, right?”

She glanced at him, startled. “What? No! Why would I know how to get to Ferelden?”

“Well, you’re from Orlais-”

“I’m from the _Dales_ , and I was _seven_ when I left.”

“You _literally_ just said I wasn’t allowed to have the map, how are you _any_ better than me?”

“I’m _older_ , and I’m more sensible.”

Finglas breathed out wearily. “Well,” he said matter-of-factly, “I guess... walk until we reach the ocean?”


	3. Highever

**9:41 Dragon**  
_Soldier’s Peak, an unspecified location in northern Ferelden_

_Two weeks to the Conclave_

If you’d asked him twenty years ago if he loved Elissa Cousland, he would have laughed bitterly. Nathaniel Howe might have been many things in his youth- brash, opinionated, a young man with youthful anger in his heart and a chip on his shoulder- but he was not fool enough to fall in love with Elissa Cousland, the Vixen of Highever. When they’d been younger, their parents had bandied about the thought of a political marriage, well before she’d garnered herself a reputation as a trouble maker. 

When they’d been caught _in flagrante delicto_ as teenagers- Elissa making the interlude even more mortifying by pushing him into orgasm after their parents had burst in on them, utterly shameless as she rode him-, she’d ruined his life by laughing aside suggestions of marriage to the point that she’d screamingly refused to wed him. A single ill-thought act of teenage lustful foolishness had seen him exiled to the Free Marches until he ‘ _better learned to control his urges_ ’ and ‘ _learned the finer points of being a gentlemen_ ’. 

He’d hated her.

If you’d asked him ten years ago if he loved Elissa Cousland, he would have laughed in surprise. It had taken him a very long time to work past his anger, his frustration at being stupid enough to fall for her charms. Everyone knew she’d take anyone willing to her bed (or sometimes not even the bed) and for him to think that their interlude had ever meant anything to her... it stung his pride immensely to realise how thoroughly uninterested she really was. A lesson hard learned, to be sure, but he’d finally swallowed down the bitter reality of the situation when word had reached him in the Free Marches of the Blight.

And his father’s murder at Elissa’s hands. 

He’d returned to Ferelden a man possessed, driven by rage and seething hate that one woman could destroy his life so thoroughly. She was grand and glorious, a woman praised above all others, and only he seemed capable of seeing through what undoubtedly _had_ to be lies. The truth, when he’d finally encountered her, was so far beyond the realms of what he’d anticipated that it left him reeling- Elissa, no great hero but a broken and frightened woman, thin and unhealthy and haunted in a way that made it unpleasant to hold her gaze for too long. 

He couldn’t ruin Elissa’s life, because it was already ruined- and his hatred of her meant nothing in the face of her overwhelming self loathing. 

He’d pitied her. 

And if you asked him _now_ if he loved Elissa Cousland, after watching her struggle against her own instincts to sabotage herself in an attempt to help the people of Amaranthine- _his_ people, the people his father should have been helping but who had gone neglected in his mad grab for power-, after watching her fight with everything in her just to live under the crushing weight of expectations the world had placed on her... after spending a decade hunting her across Thedas as she desperately chased down ghosts and threw herself into danger with alarming regularity... well...

The answer wasn’t really that straight forward anymore. 

Nathaniel shuddered with relief as he stepped out of the chill of the caverns below Soldier’s Peak, the weak winter sunshine a blessed change to the bitingly cold air of the caves. His breath steamed before him like smoke curling from a dragon’s nostrils, and he tugged his cloak closer around him as he found the trail half buried beneath last night’s snow and set off uphill. 

This high up in the hills, the clouds seemed to hang threateningly low in the sky, almost as if he could reach up and brush his fingertips against them. Behind him, he could hear the low scraping rumble of the stone shifting back into place, concealing the entrance to the cave; the hillside was riddled with dead ends and pressure plates that opened secret pathways, all the better to keep the old warden fort a secret. Whether the labyrinthine tunnels were the work of the original builders back in the days of Warden Commander Asturian, or whether it was something added on by later occupants, he didn’t know; the history of the Wardens in Ferelden was a fragmented and frustratingly cryptic subject, and even having an ancient Warden in their ranks did little to improve their knowledge of the past.

At the thought of Warden Avernus, Nathaniel gritted his teeth and glanced upwards, to where the ghostly outline of the Keep was slowly emerging from the mists of the low lying clouds. It was an eerie sight, enough to make his skin crawl, especially with the heavy silence that hung in the air. Soldier’s Peak was all but invisible from the flatlands below, even on a clear day; the architects had planned well when they’d picked this location, and the faint sounds of life within the grounds of the fort were relatively muted by the walls and the clouds. 

Unless you knew where to look for it, you’d never know an ancient, nigh on impenetrable fortress lay just a few days ride from Highever. 

There were torches along the wall, and the subtle glint of helmets; he waved wearily to the guard, knowing that either his face would be recognised or that Elissa’s forewarning would see him through. Sure enough, as he drew closer the heavy iron-clad doors creaked and began to swing inwards, the sound of thick metal chains echoing through the narrow valley. The courtyard beyond appeared through the widening gap, freshly cleared of snow and relatively empty of life for the hour of the day; there was a single figure waiting for him in the shade of the portcullis, familiar now after all these years of travelling between the Vigil and the Peak. 

Levi Dryden had aged well, which wasn’t that surprising- he’d gone from a meagre life on the road, picking at whatever earnings he and his family could scrape together, to seneschal of a noble house. Granted, Soldier’s Peak did not entertain guests, so there was no need for him to act in any particularly official capacity, but still- a quiet life in a castle seemed to agree with him, if the colour in his cheeks and the laughter lines besides his eyes was anything to go by. 

“My Lord Howe,” Dryden said, sketching a shallow bow; Nathaniel noted the way his hand stayed firmly upon the pommel of his rapier, and he had to wonder who had been teaching a family of merchants how to wield such a blade. He wondered why Dryden felt it necessary to wear it in the safety of the Keep. “I hope you did not have too much trouble finding the paths?”

“Not so much,” Nathaniel said, keeping his arms at his side instead of reaching to grasp a hand offered in welcome. That did not seem to be a sign in his favour. “There is a slight cave-in along the north edge of Sophia’s Cavern, but it looks like it was mostly caused by snow melt. There’s sunlight coming down from above.”

“I’ll have the lads look into it.” He gestured politely towards the main doors of the keep. “Shall we?”

The courtyard was empty but for them, with only the guards above the gate for company; there were lights in the windows of the keep and the outbuildings, of course, but very little in the way of life and vivacity. Last time he had visited, the Dryden clan had had any number of children running about and frolicking, and now there was not even any discarded toys in the yard to suggest they remained within. There was an uneasiness in the air, something that prickled faintly against his skin, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. 

“It’s quiet,” he said bluntly, watching Levi out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Peak this subdued before.”

Levi stiffened, only slightly, and if he hadn’t been paying attention he would have missed it; as it was, that reaction warned him far more than the man’s carefully chosen words. “The weather has not been kind in these parts recently,” he said vaguely, beginning the climb up the stairs to the massive front doors of the keep. “It has been far more sensible to stay indoors, for the most part.”

“Elissa is still here, I trust? The weather didn’t force her to change her plans?”

Again with the hint of tension along Levi’s jaw, as if he’d clenched his teeth together instinctively out of... what? Fear? Anger? Loathing? “The Lady Cousland is still with us, yes,” he said, almost hesitantly. “As is her... honoured guest.”

 _Ah._

Nathaniel didn’t push the point, and he wisely kept his opinions to himself; he was not so incompetent that he would fan the discontent that clearly existed between mistress and manservant, if only because neither Elissa nor Levi deserved that sort of behaviour from him. Better to stay neutral, keep his mouth tightly shut. 

He politely followed Levi through the main doors, not drawing the conversation back to the presence of a creature that was clearly causing unhappiness amongst the inhabitants of the keep. To be completely honest, he had not realised that the creature that referred to itself as The Architect had left the sanctuary of his private laboratories in Kal’hirol, and he couldn’t necessarily say he blamed Dryden for his apprehension. The Architect was... well. Another one of Elissa’s questionable allies, if he was being polite, and even if the creature had proved itself invaluable to them over the last decade, he couldn’t fault anyone who found it unnerving. 

He didn’t want to think about what Avernus and The Architect were capable of when they worked together.

He didn’t want to think about what Elissa hoped to achieve in _letting_ them.

The Keep itself was warm and homely, fires flickering merrily in the hearths and the hot air rising from the grates; he’d heard the tales of the mess it had been when Elissa and Levi had stumbled upon it a decade earlier, with snow piled high under broken windows and furniture rotting from the damp and withered, decaying bodies lying over dark and unnerving stains- and that was without taking the veil tear into consideration. These days it was a castle as fine as any in the land, with bright tapestries and thick rugs on the polished stone, the hearths all freshly scraped and scrubbed. 

The bookshelves had been repaired or replaced, he wasn’t sure which, and they were brimming with volumes both crisply coloured and tattered and worn; it would be curious, actually, to see which of the books in the vast collection belonged to the Dryden clan, which were the obligatory library standards, and which were treasures that Elissa had accumulated on her trek across Thedas uncovering the most esoteric and bleakly eccentric magics in existence. He wasn’t entirely sure of the things she had done in her grief and desperation- mostly she refused to talk about those years, alluding to terrible things occasionally if she was in a dramatic mood- but the scars and brands burned across her skin certainly hinted at the desperate lengths she had gone to. 

It would be unsettling to think of books containing any such magics to be within reach of children, casually on display in the main halls, so it was simply best _not_ to think of it. 

There were sounds of life now that they were indoors, voices drifting down the hallways and laughter echoing from distant rooms; there were toys scattered across the floor by one of the hearths, and the tables were an interesting tableau into the daily lives of the Peak inhabitants- one table piled high with rolls of fabric, scraps littering the floor around it while scissors and chalk and threaded needles lay atop the rolls. Another seemed to suggest a lesson in progress, a half dozen books propped open on the table while a bowl in the centre held a variety of wax colouring sticks. There were cups placed on shelves and beside chairs, burnt wicks lying unattended in pools of wax, there were winter coats and scarves draped over the backs of the worn couches...

It was, he realised with a pang of homesickness, far more loved and lived in than most noble homes he had visited across the years- even the Vigil under his parents had been a coldly austere place, always fantastically well organised and obsessively tidy and utterly lifeless. 

There was something heartbreaking in that the place that felt most like a home was the place belonging to a woman who felt she didn’t deserve one. 

Nathaniel paused before one of the numerous fires to peel his gloves from his frozen fingers, flexing them with a grimace and holding them out towards the heat. “I have to say, I find the number of overly dramatic warden tapestries amusing,” he said, nodding towards one of the closest ones. It featured a woman he assumed was intended to be Elissa during the Siege of Denerim, seated rather defiantly atop a ridiculously spiky dragon with a shining sword held aloft; to the best of his knowledge, the Archdemon was significantly more horrifying than just a spiked dragon, and Elissa had certainly never ridden the blasted thing. “I can’t believe she lets you keep them up.”

“Lady Cousland has never had a bad word to say about the Keep’s decorations,” Levi said, his tone almost defensive. “In fact, she has often been nothing but kind and encouraging when the girls show her their projects.”

Nathaniel raised an eyebrow at that. “Are we talking about the same Lady Cousland?” he asked. “Because the Elissa I know got excessively drunk one evening and spent a good hour or two trying to push over her own statue in the market in Denerim and eventually had to be carried away when she burst into tears and started shouting at it.”

Levi quite positively bristled. “The Lady has her moods, as any of us might,” he said. “On the occasion that her temper gets the better of her, she has always been bluntly apologetic after.”

“It’s alright, Dryden- you can say tactless.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Elissa’s ability to inspire such fierce loyalty in those around her was a constant fascination for him, not least of all because he couldn’t claim immunity to it himself. After all, hadn’t he just spent the last ten years chasing her shadow, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the duties she had entrusted him with and trying with everything in him to save her from her own grief? 

He smiled sadly and looked away. “Dare I ask if she’s in a mood for receiving guests?”

“It’s hard to say, my Lord. She has kept primarily to herself this visit, only leaving her quarters to, ah... well, to spend time with the... creature.”

He’d gauged as much from her last letter, despite her cryptic wording. “May I...?”

Levi waved him away. “By all means, my Lord- as always, you have the run of the Keep. We just ask that you don’t expose any of the little ones to, well...”

“You have my word, Dryden.”

Nathaniel shrugged off his cloak and left it hanging on a peg by the fire, and Levi left him to his own devices at that point; he came and went with enough regularity that he needed no escort to find his way around, and it continued to amaze him that after ten years, Soldier’s Peak was still a secret to most of the world. He knew Elissa had kept news of its discovery from the Wardens, and even Alistair had stared blankly at him when he’d casually alluded to it in conversation several months after Elissa had first vanished. 

He didn’t really understand the history between the two of them other than that it was _complicated_ (but wasn’t everything _complicated_ when it came to Elissa?), but it had worked in her favour not to reveal the location of the Peak to him. The half dozen times Nathaniel had found her and convinced her to come home again, she always retreated to the Peak rather than to Highever or Amaranthine, to lick her wounds in private and build back her strength before vanishing again and starting the chase all over again. 

There was no answer when he rapped on the door to her quarters, and a brief inspection revealed the chambers to be dark and empty, the fire in the hearth burned down to embers. The bed was unmade, and her clothes were strewn about- it didn’t surprise him that she would have enforced boundaries about her living space, but it made his heart ache to see the mess. There was a faint odour of malaise on the air, not enough to suggest she was desperately ill of course, but enough that he wrinkled his nose as he stood in the dark room looking for any sign of her. 

There were empty vials lying on the desk, lying in a sticky residue, and he touched a finger tentatively to the spill and held it up to his nose; the inside of his nose tingled unpleasantly, and he grimaced. Lyrium tonics- he’d given up hope that she might have broken her addiction entirely, but at least the tonics were less damaging than the infused alcohols she’d been so fond of for a time. 

With a frustrated sigh, he made a quick effort to tidy up- pulling the sheets up on the bed, piling the dirty clothes into one corner, sweeping the empty vials off the desk and into the top drawer. He tried to rouse the fire with the poker, but it seemed like a lost cause. 

He closed the door to the apartment quietly behind him and set off deeper into the Keep, steeling himself as he prepared for his next destination. 

The rampart that led to Avernus’ private tower was cloaked in the fog of the low lying clouds, the sun only a weak ball of pale yellow light overhead; the sound around him was eerily muted, even his footsteps making little noise in the mist. He didn’t bother to knock, because there was no point- the ancient warden always seemed to know when he had guests whether they announced themselves or not. Whether he had some sort of proximity ward around the tower, or whether his research into malevolent magics had given him some sort of preternatural senses, Nathaniel didn’t know; really, he didn’t want to know.

The tower was nowhere near as homely as the rest of the Keep- there were books piled against the walls, and the legs of the tables, and in front of the bookshelves. There were scrolls and rolled tapestries and chests and trinkets scattered throughout, some of which looked entirely too sinister in nature to have an innocent purpose; he quite pointedly did not look at the various stains across the floor, or pay attention to the way his skin crawled from more than just the cold. 

The central chamber opened up before him as she climbed the stairs from the antechamber, and on the far platform he could see Avernus bent over a book, even more leathery and wizened than he’d been last time Nathaniel had visited; he wasn’t really sure how that was possible, given that he couldn’t actually tell if there was any flesh left on the man’s bones or whether he was just skin stretched too tightly over a withered frame. 

Elissa made painfully strange friends. 

“Ah,” came the familiar, booming voice, far stronger and louder than the sunken frame suggested possible, “my _dear_ young Howe, how are you this fine day?” 

He gritted his teeth and ignored the faintly sweet scent of rot and decay in the room. “Warden Avernus,” he said politely, carefully navigating the space between the desks and the tables and the cages- he prided himself on not shuddering- as he made his way to the platform. “As well as can be expected, given the circumstances.”

“‘ _As well as can be expected_ ’- my my, isn’t that mysterious _and_ dramatic.”

“There’s been-”

“A rather disturbing surge in the strength of the song your brethren can hear,” Avernus said, his voice almost amused; he glanced at him and chuckled. “Don’t look so surprised, young man- to whom do you suppose it is you speak?”

Nathaniel swallowed down the sharp retort on his tongue- not least of which was his bristling hatred of being called _young man_ in such a patronising tone when his fortieth year fast approached- and instead clasped his hands behind his back. “You've heard it, then,” he said. “The Calling.”

Avernus paused in his work and looked rather pointedly over the top of his eyeglasses at him. “I have heard the Calling for nigh on two centuries now,” he said. “I can assure you without a doubt that the song currently swimming through your veins is no more a sign of your Calling than I am the Emperor of Orlais.”

He rocked back on his heels, considering his words carefully; he hated the word games the old man played, the way he danced around him and left him in tangles. “But we can all hear it,” he mused, thinking quickly. “An Archdemon? Surely there wouldn’t be another so soon after the last Blight-”

“Again, while your penchant for the dramatic is admirable, you are incorrect.” He smiled thinly, and his gaze turned back to his books, quill scratching roughly over the pages. “Of the two of us, I can assure you that only one of us has heard the beautiful and terrible song of an Archdemon, and even if it was only from afar, it was nothing at all like this.”

Nathaniel waited impatiently for him to continue, but the silence stretched longer and longer; Avernus, to all intents and purposes, appeared to be ignoring him. “And?” he snapped finally.

“And what, dear boy?”

“And surely you must have an answer to this madness, if you rule out the only two plausible options.”

“Nothing of the sort, I assure you,” Avernus said, not even looking up from his work. “Just because I possess the necessary experience to rule out your first choices for an explanation does not mean I have sought endlessly for a third.”

“But how can you just _ignore_ it?” His frustration was rising, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “Isn’t it driving you to distraction?”

“I would hardly have survived so long if I was fool enough to let every little distraction of the last two hundred years chip away at my sanity, now, would I?” There was a moment of silence, and then a muttered “Although certain mortals seem determined to test my patience beyond normal.”

“So you have no idea what it is?”

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Avernus said, as if they were simply having a casual conversation over breakfast. “But one would presume that if someone were to view the Wardens as a threat, the easiest way to remove them with minimal bloodshed would be to convince them to remove _themselves_.”

Nathaniel was silent for a long moment, chewing on his bottom lip. “That makes sense,” he said finally, “but who-”

“My dear Lord Howe, if we are to engage in a spirited game of _Guess Who_ , might it wait until such a time as I am blessedly unavailable to contribute? Perhaps after I am dead, for example.”

“So it doesn’t worry you that someone is going to such extreme lengths to attack-”

“To _possibly_ attack.”

“To _possibly_ attack the wardens?” he corrected, biting back the surge of irritation at Avernus’ amused tone.

“If I were one to concern myself with the affairs of the Wardens, I would not have sequestered myself away for two hundred years in a drafty tower like some storybook villain. Their politics are of no interest to me- Elissa allows me to work to the best of my abilities, and that suits me quite well.”

Speaking of Elissa... “Is she down in the cellar laboratories?” he asked, wrinkling his nose as he eyed a particularly suspicious looking beaker and the dark liquid contained within.

“Beg pardon?”

“ _Elissa_ ,” he said, exasperated. “Is she down in the cellars?”

“Why on earth would she be downstairs in the cellars?”

He wanted to throw his hands in the air in frustration. “If The Architect is here, and Elissa is not in her quarters and is not in your tower, then obviously-”

“You are so determined for things to _obvious_ , Lord Howe, when so often things are quite the opposite. Simple, perhaps, but not obvious.”

“I cannot feel the presence of another Warden but for yourself.”

Avernus chuckled. “If you cannot sense her, she must not be here, correct?” He sighed extravagantly. “Ah, the simplicity of youth. To be so young and so certain of my understanding of the world again!”

Nathaniel gritted his teeth. “I received word that she would be here,” he said, fighting to keep his tone polite. “My understanding from the letter was that she was rather anxious to see me.”

“Well then, my Lord Warden, there are two options before you now- either _Elissa_ lied to you, or your _senses_ lie to you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Elissa told you she would be here, and yet you cannot sense her,” Avernus said calmly, folding his hands before him. “So, either she lied to you, and vacated the Keep, or she is here and is simply beyond your ability to sense her.”

Nathaniel scowled at him, immensely frustrated at his cryptic wordplay, and opened his mouth to rebuke him-

\- and then stopped.

Avernus was clearly waiting for such a reaction, and he cackled delightedly. “And the penny drops at last.”

Nathaniel gaped stupidly, the floor having dropped completely out from under him; he finally managed to snap his mouth shut, and then cleared his throat awkwardly. “She... she did it?”

“I imagine that’s a conversation best held with her, rather than myself- and before you flail about moodily, she is downstairs, in one of the bedchambers below me.” At Nathaniel’s continued stare, Avernus shrugged. “I do not question the whims and fancies of our dear Lady Cousland- I am simply a humble servant. To the best of my knowledge, she was too exhausted and too fragile to warrant returning to her rooms and risk being endlessly fussed over by the extensive Dryden brood.”

“I... I didn’t know there were other rooms-”

“So perhaps you thought I just floated whimsically atop a hollow tower?” Avernus laughed merrily as Nathaniel flushed angrily. “The stairwell on the far left by the main door will take you downstairs. I do not know where she has taken up residence, but I imagine she can’t be that hard to find.”

The door in question was stiff from decades of neglect, squeaking when he had to lean heavily onto it to force it open; as promised, there was a stairwell beyond, winding down around the outside curve of the tower. The steps were thick with dust, and the wind was whistling sharply through a broken pane of glass, and only one in every three of the torches was light. He kept one hand on the wall as he eased his way down, testing every step before he put his full weight on it; there was a set of smaller footprints in the dust, the markings heavier on the left foot than the right. 

Elissa had come this way recently, or someone with a similar limp to her. 

On the very first landing, the dust had been kicked and scuffed significantly more than the stairs, and there was a torch settled beside the closed door. He still felt nothing, no familiar tug in the pit of his stomach that alerted him to the presence of a nearby warden, and for a long moment he hesitated outside the door, hand resting on the doorknob as he tried to reconcile what his senses were telling him with what he knew to be true.

And what that meant for Elissa. 

He took a deep breath, and before he could lose his nerve, he pushed open the door. 

The chamber beyond was a single room, and at some point it’d been used as a bedroom, recently enough that it seemed sufficiently liveable. There was dust, certainly, and cobwebs over the frosted window frame, but the furniture was sound and the linens on the bed were not a mouldy, rotten clump of damp and decay. Granted, the bed wasn’t neat, but given the person currently occupying the room, he wasn’t surprised about that. 

There was a large copper bath tub before the fireplace, and a pale, gaunt figure was hunched over in the water. Nathaniel cleared his throat to announce his entrance, and she didn’t even move in response. Her hair was longer than when he’d last seen her, and there were more streaks of grey through the dark locks, but otherwise it was her.

His heart leapt up into his throat, and he swallowed it back down again. 

“Do you need me to come back later?” he asked quietly, staying near to the door when she didn’t acknowledge his arrival.

Her head turned slightly, as if she were about to glance at him over her shoulder; for a long, fragile moment, he thought she meant not to answer, and then he heard her sigh. 

“No,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and hollow. 

“Do you need me to stay by the door?”

She took even longer with her answer, still half turned towards him, as motionless as if she were a stone carving in the water. “No,” she said finally, and her voice trembled, as if she were on the verge of tears. 

He hesitated a moment longer, before carefully walking towards her; he kept his hands at his sides, and his movements slow, in case she changed her mind and panicked. There was a chair on its side by the bed, and he stooped to grab it, setting it down behind the tub; the water swished softly in the quiet of the room and she settled back against the edge of the bath, and he slumped down into the chair and leaned forward, wrapping his arms gently around her and resting his chin onto her shoulder. She melted back against him, not a sensual act but one of exhaustion, as if she were completely hollow and utterly devoid of strength. 

One hand came up to rest over his where he held her, and her head was nestled up beside his, her lips beside his ear. She was breathing shallowly, as if it was an effort to draw air into her lungs, and she felt unpleasantly cold; he dipped his fingers into the water, grimacing when it only felt tepid instead of warm. “You should probably get out before you catch ill,” he murmured, tightening his hold around her slightly. 

She chuckled hoarsely, the sound a hollow echo in her chest. “It’s a bit late for that.” Her fingers ran absently along his forearm, enough to make him shiver, and he felt her sigh, as if it pained her to do so. 

“That’s a different kind of ill, Lis,” he said, pressing his lips against her bony shoulder in some semblance of a kiss. This close, he could see how thin she was beneath the water, how her ribs pressed up against her skin, the scars and unnatural patterns that marked her flesh standing out in stark relief against the unhealthy pallor of her skin. 

The hand not resting over his was trailing absently through the water, and there were ugly red scars running the length of her inner arm, puckered and thick and fresh. There were older scars beneath them, pale white and thin, but these were horrendous to look at- he shuddered to think what had caused them, or how she had survived them. 

And he still couldn’t feel her presence.

He shivered and turned his face into the curve of her neck. “So... you...?”

“Yes,” she said simply, almost sharply, knowing what his question was and knowing better than to drag it out.

“Completely? You can’t...?”

“The Taint is gone entirely,” she whispered, and then laughed bitterly. “For the first time in ten years, I’m alone in my head, and it’s _horrifying_.” 

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“The song, at least, distracted me from myself,” she said. “The silence is...”

He tightened his hold on her, as if that could convey everything he wanted to say to her. As if he could bring warmth back to her cold and pallid flesh, as if he could bring life and laughter back into her heart. 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you needed me to be, Nate,” she whispered, twisting her fingers in his hair. “It was killing me.”

His laugh was gentle. “It’s killing all of us, Lis,” he said softly. “That’s rather the point of being a Warden.”

“You know what I mean, though.”

“I do.”

He felt the shudder that passed through her, the tremulous intake of air as if she was about to burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Nate,” she repeated, her voice catching on the words. 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Do you want to get out of the bath?” 

She hesitated before answering, nodding almost frantically. “Yes,” she whispered.

He untangled himself from her grip and climbed back to his feet, leaving her shivering in the now cold water while he searched about for a towel or a robe. He found it tossed on the ground on the far side of the bed and returned to the tub with it just as she was trying to climb to her feet, quite visibly and horrifyingly shaky as she tried to find her balance. Catching her as she went to fall, he made wordless soothing noises to her as he scooped her out and set her carefully on her feet, wrapping the robe around her shoulders while he murmured encouragement to her, brushing the tears away from her cheeks with his thumbs before tying the sash around her waist for her. 

“Where’s Justice?” he asked softly.

She seemed almost drunk, weaving on her feet until he took pity on her and scooped her up into his arms, carrying her over to the bed. “Somewhere else,” she said, the words almost slurred. “He was... restless. Didn’t want to sit around doing nothing. Told him to go downhill, help on a farm for a few days.”

“There’s a spirit of justice working as a farmhand?”

“Or something,” she slurred. He went to straighten again after depositing her on the bed, but her fingers dug into his shirt. “Don’t leave me.”

He crawled onto the bed beside her, arms going around her as she buried her face against his chest, and when the tears came it was like she’d been holding them back for years, great ugly sobs that wracked through her brittle frame and left her heaving and choking and whimpering against him. And through it all she stuttered apologies to him, as if absolution would ease the pain in her, as if his murmured acceptance was all she needed to find peace. 

The reluctant Hero of Ferelden was a warden no longer, just like she’d wanted.


	4. The Frostback Mountains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lasair previously featured in another story leading up to Inquisition, [A Piercing Little Star](http://archiveofourown.org/works/679823/chapters/1246297)
> 
> My interpretation of the Avvar ended up being quite different to Bioware's once they released Jaws of Hakkon, but I stand by my world building- what little information existed about them prior to JoH was massively contradictory, so I made the best of a bad situation.

**9:41 Dragon**   
_Imabruk Piqaluyak, the Frostback Mountains_

_One week to the Conclave_

Lasair adjusted her hold on the tree trunk as she leaned further out, following the slow trek of the Lowlanders as they made their way up the mountain. The sun bounced off the fresh fallen snow, enough to have her eyes aching even through the bone carved goggles on her face, and her mouth twisted in amusement as she watched the travellers gesture towards the sky in irritation. She couldn’t hear them at this distance, but she could very well guess what they were saying. 

“ _Lasair_.” The voice below her sounded just as irritable as she imagined the _iglaak_ to be, and she grinned. “Are you just hoping the Lady will take an interest in you and take you up as a bird? Or are you actually _doing_ something up there?”

She glanced down through the branches, to where her companion stood leaning against the tree, arms crossed casually without a care in the world. “Ey, Maleek, aren’t you supposed to be keeping watch? Or are you doing your best impression of Sigfrost the Slumberous?”

“And here I was thinking you didn’t even know the name of the wise one,” Maleek called, not even looking up when she dislodged a fine spray of snow from the branches above him. His long hair was jet black against the frosting of snowflakes, twisted and tied back away from his face with a leather thong, trailing feathers and beads down his back. “Or did he only come to visit your dreams out of disbelief that there could be one so dense?”

“Admitting you think me a favoured companion of the gods, again?”

“More likely any _agaayun_ who is unlucky enough to encounter you cannot help but baulk at the miracle that you haven’t gone and gotten yourself dead at the bottom of a crevasse somewhere.” He snorted, clearly amused by himself as he flicked a broken scrap of bark off of his bare arm. His copper brown skin was almost lustrous in the sunlight, a few shades lighter than her own burnished bronze. “Although after your escapade last moon, leaving Ikit trapped on the ice flow in the middle of the lake like that, even a fool can see you’ve the god’s own luck.”

She glared down through the branches. “Ey, if _you_ want to deal with a dozen half mad boy-kings wanting to snatch themselves a bride, only ever thinking with their damned _usuk_ , then be my guest!” 

“I liked the time when you tricked Sauri into taking his pants off and then stole them.”

The reminder brought a grudging smile to her face as she turned back to watching the Lowlanders. “Well, he had to live up to his namesake, didn’t he?” she said. “Heir to a clan named Shine of the Moon? Of course I was going to leave him with his arse out.”

The Lowlanders were on the far side of the _imabruk_ , clustered around the Ferelden village of Haven, and then the abandoned temple further up the mountain. Lasair hadn’t been much more than a child at the time, but she remembered the days when the village had been home to a cult; their clan had coexisted uneasily with the village for hundreds of years, trading furs and pelts for things like vegetables and wheat, things that their migrational lifestyle made it harder to come by. Sometimes, every generation or so, men from the clan would risk snatching themselves a wife from the village, and relations would suffer for years after. Even less often, sometimes one of the clan slipped away in the night, only to be spotted months later in the clothes of the Lowlander, moving about the village next time they stopped to trade.

That uneasy coexistence had been torn away a decade earlier, when the _aggun tuungak_ had awoken again and begun scurrying through from their tunnels and into the light. Word had travelled from the south with the traders, and then from their brethren in the south west, and then clans had begun pushing up into territory not named for them, fleeing to higher ground to escape the ravenous creatures. With them had come the woman the Lowlanders called a hero, the Grey Warden- their people knew of Grey Ones, of course, and some amongst the clans even found it fitting to pledge their stone and their steel to their cause. She had no idea what it would be like to set aside clan and kin, to walk in lands where the voice of the gods could not reach; it made her shudder just to think of it. 

There were great evils in the world, to be sure, but she couldn’t say whether she’d be strong enough to face them- especially if she couldn’t hear the comforting whisper of Hakkon or the Lady or great Korth to soothe her heart. It was a strange soul indeed who walked away from clan and gods to hunt evil in the empty darkness, and she respected the Grey Ones as much as she found them quite mad. 

This one who had come to the mountains was no different. 

The Grey Warden woman had left the village empty, the townsfolk massacred; Lasair had no idea what had occurred within the walls of the town, and her elder kin had never seen it appropriate to provide her with the details once she had come of age. All she knew was, however uneasy the relationship between Avvar and townsfolk, they had lost a valuable trading partner, and had struggled in the years after to cope with other clans encroaching on their hunting grounds and the loss of a source of trade. 

When the Lowlanders had flocked back to the village a few years after the massacre, they had not taken well to their first overtures of friendship, assuming the clan intended to attack them. They’d calmed down in the years since, and trade had resumed, but this grand flurry of activity... this was unsettling. 

Too many people in the area had frightened away the game the clan relied upon to sustain them through the winter- it was only by Korth’s blessing that they’d had a good surplus the year before, enough to have aired and dried a good supply of meat, and had traded away the remainder for the sake of the gold the _dweorg_ were so fond of. So far they’d been able to barter with the mage clan in Cadash Thaig, and with a few villages lower down the slopes towards the lowlands. 

Gold meant nothing to them, except that it could fill their bellies with something other than fish and eel. The lake they were named for sustained them at the bidding of Korth, but if she never had to have another baked eel, it would still be too soon. 

“They’ve got to be a couple thousand strong by now,” she called, serious again as she took hold of the trunk of the tree and leaned out dangerously over the void for a better view between the treetops. “ _Naluruk iglaak_. They can’t plan to stay, or they’ll be dead in a month or two. Hakkon won’t stand for this disrespect.”

“Have you _ever_ seen lowlanders show respect to the Lord of Winter? Disrespect is their natural state of being.”

“They can’t _all_ be daft,” she said, frowning as she watched the winter sunlight glint of off armour and weapons, watched the flashes of colour from their fancy clothes that would only weigh them down once the storms swept through. “I mean, a lot of them sure, but all of them?”

“There’s a reason they don’t bother with the mountains,” Maleek said, “can’t even tell the difference between _kinu_ and _mugallik_ until they’re waist deep in ice water and bound for the Void.”

Even through the bone slit goggles, her eyes were aching from the sunlight reflecting off the sun, and she looked away from the mass of people milling throughout the township and trailing like lost lambs up the hillside. She pushed the goggles up onto her forehead and rubbed at her eyes, the black tar-like substance on her cheeks smearing onto her fingertips. “They’ve elders with them, and wee ones,” she said, frustration seeping into her voice. “Eya, is this some kind of new cult? Are they marching up the mountaintop to die?”

“Good riddance, I say- and they’ll be all ready for the Lady to pick their bones clean, up in the open air all polite like.”

She squinted as she gazed down at the town, at the tiny distant figures swarming over it like ants. “Could always go down and ask, I suppose,” she mused.

“Now who’s the daft one?”

Lasair poked a clump of snow on one of the overhanging branches with the toe of her boot, sending it crashing down on Maleek’s head; his spluttering and cursing wafted up to her and she cackled, settling back onto the branch and letting her legs dangle over the immense drop to the ground. “Ey, watch yourself cousin, old Wintersbreath spat down the back of your jerkin.”

Maleek glared up at her, the look only more comical with the bone slit goggles making it look like he was squinting ferociously at her, and she hooted with laughter. “May Korth take mercy on us the day he sets you at the head of the clan,” he grumbled, shaking his clothes to dislodge the snow and cursing under his breath. “He’d be better off just letting the Trickster have at us, because at least he might find it more fun to play with us than to send us into ruin.”

Lasair snorted. “We both know that I run circles around them others, thanes and jarls alike. If I weren’t worth my salt, I would’ve been carted off by the first overeager bridegroom- instead there’s barely a clan north of the white waters that hasn’t shamed themselves in the attempt.”

“Ey- and what about when you irk enough of them that they decide the grudge is worth enough to unite against us?”

“And who’d get to wed me in the end, ey? Ain’t none of them willing to give up the right to a bride, so there’ll be no alliance any time soon.”

Below her, Maleek snorted. “You are ridiculously optimistic, cousin.”

Lasair grinned. “One of us has to be, _illuga_ , or what’s the point of it all?”

She stretched and climbed cautiously onto her feet, keeping one hand on the trunk to keep her steady; the wind swirled around her, cold and rich and deep, the scent of pines and snow and ancient stone filling her nose. The world around her seemed so perfectly in balance, alive in a way the lowlanders couldn’t appreciate- even from this distance, she could see the thin trailing smoke from their campfires, and their garish colours made it impossible for them to have any hope of hiding from enemies or predators. They were loud, noisy and cantankerous and unconcerned with the way they walked over the snow, turning the mountainside to mud and slush and ruining any chance of the topsoil still clinging to the hill come spring. 

Come spring, however, the clan would move higher into the mountains, to avoid the flooding that came with the melts as Hakkon sweated and fumed under the warming sun. Come spring, they’d be away from this nonsense, but for now...

... for now these daft lowlanders were endangering everyone she cared about. 

“You fallen asleep up there, Lasair?”

“Maleek ap Aariak, I am hurt and insulted that you would think me such a lowly hunter-”

“You’ve been sleeping in trees since you were knee high to an icehopper, don’t bring your fake wounded pride to me.”

She lifted a hand to the sky in mock disbelief. “Lady, do you hear the abuse my own clansman turns against me? No wonder she ain’t gone and sent down some burly brown hunter to steal you away.”

“And _now_ who’s needlessly hurling about abuse? As if my poor, fragile heart wasn’t battered enough knowing that every hulking bronto of a man smashing in our door is there to snatch you up, and never me.”

‘We’ll hide you in my bunk, and when they come to snatch me, they’ll be halfway back to their clan house before they realise the wee lass over their shoulder ain’t going to pop out a brood for them.”

“If they want to try and make me pregnant, they are welcome to try as often and enthusiastically as they like,” he sighed. 

“Ey, stranger things have happened- the Lady turned a whole clan into snakes, after all. Maybe if you burn the right herbs to her, or to Rilla, one of them will take pity and make your belly swell.” 

From high above her head came the familiar piercing cry of a raptor, and she glanced upwards, careful not to look close to the sun at all. Without her goggles, she was already feeling the ache in her eyes from the snowshine, and she didn’t fancy making it worse. Circling above the lake was a dark spot, turning in lazy circles in the updrafts coming up off the sheer mountain slopes, and when she lifted her hand to shield her eyes and look closer, it tucked its wings close to its body and surged towards her, a teardrop shaped beast plummeting earthward.

Lasair grinned.

She lifted her hand to her lips and let out a shrill whistle from between her pinched fingers, and the teardrop shape pulled out of the dive, wings splayed as it bled off speed in the last few feet towards her. She held out her arm, leather clad from wrist to elbow, and a moment later a white and brown speckled bird crashed into her arm, wickedly taloned claws wrapping around the girth of her wrist and a wing batting at her face as he fought to balance himself on her arm.

“Ila, you clumsy,” she crooned, easing back to sit with her back to the trunk of the tree, so that Ila didn’t overbalance her and send them both tumbling to the ground. “You’re far too eager for your own good- it makes you look clingy.”

“Is that your daft bird?” Lasair rolled her eyes good naturedly before she looked down to Maleek. “Tell him he’s embarrassing himself.”

“Don’t you listen to him,” she said, “he’s just jealous.”

A snort of laughter echoed up from below. “Ey, any sign of that elf _iksi_ , or his pack?” Maleek said. “If he’s going to be as needy for your attention as a newborn, the least he can do is pull his weight.” 

She cooed quietly to the raptor, tugging a piece of raw meat from her waist satchel and tossing it up to him; he caught it with practised ease, hooked bill snapping past her face to snare the treat. “Ey, what of it Ila,” she murmured, running her fingers down the bird’s crest. “See any more of that _amaguk_?”

The raptor made a low pitched warbling sound, something between a growl and a hiss, bobbing his head up and down. “Hard to say,” she called to Maleek. “He’s a bit too worked up about the crowds.”

“Is he throwing a tantrum because there’s someone in his playpen?”

If it was possible for a raptor to scowl, Ila would’ve scowled ferociously just now; he let out a squalling chirp, hunched low on her arm as if he was preparing himself to launch into flight again. “Oh, don’t you fuss,” she scolded, scratching his head. She pulled out another piece of meat for him and he perked up visibly. “See? You’re just being a brat.”

“Are we quite done?” She could’ve made a joke about his choice of words, but she let it slide. “The hares were a good catch, and I’m desperate for a meal that doesn’t have eel in it. I want to get them back and leave one out for the Lady.”

She stretched languidly. “Nice to know I’m not the only one sick of eel and pickled cabbage,” she called. Sitting up and away from the trunk of the tree, she lifted the wrist that Ila sat upon and held it up to her shoulder, where a well worn and scarred branch poked out from the top of her quiver. Ila chwirked grumpily before climbing up onto the branch, settling in to groom his feathers once he was comfortable. 

Tightening the straps around her chest to make sure nothing slid loose during the descent, she swung off the bough and raced downwards, hopping from branch to branch, hand over hand, until she dropped the last six feet into the snow beside Maleek. He made an exaggerated sneer of distaste at her appearance, delicately flicking a small clump of snow from his shoulder as if disgusted by it, and then rolled his eyes when Ila screeched at him.

“I don’t have anything for you, you unholy terror,” he said, but he reached out and scratched him briefly. 

Lasair checked all of her straps a second time, making sure that her bow was safely secured across her back, and that the other quiver by her hip hadn’t lost its arrows in the tree tops. “I’ve a little gold,” she said hesitantly, her hand passing over the pouch at her hip. “There are merchants with the lowlanders, plenty of dweorg. We could maybe see... perhaps we could get a little something to supplement the stores? I know Uki is worried we won’t have enough laid down from last summer to see us through ‘til spring.”

Maleek, gods bless him, didn’t mock her for the suggestion, as most would. Instead, he put his hand on her free shoulder, well away from Ila’s sharp claws and savage beak. “You know as well as I that the merchants in that rabble will be charging the god’s own prices for their goods,” he said gently. “Whatever gold you’ve got, they’ll swindle you out of faster than Hakkon’s temper changes.”

She chewed on her lip unhappily. “You’re right,” she said miserably. “I just don’t like seeing the clan go hungry.”

“We’ll not go hungry, _illuga_ , save your tears. If Korth wants for us to fight a little harder this winter, then we’ll do better to appease him in the spring.” He grimaced. “And we’ll just have to eat a few more eel bakes than we’d like.”

Laughing, they set off through the trees for home, skirting around the edge of the vast lake and away from the rabble in the mountains. They avoided the deeper drifts of snow, and the odd places where the rocky landscape had collected treacherous puddles of melt, a trap to snare the unwary in a pit of freezing water without warning. The forest was dishearteningly empty, the game either already snatched up by the lowlanders or driven away out of fear for the influx into the peaks. She couldn’t really say she blamed them for fleeing, but it made for eerie travelling. 

Even with the silence in the trees, she could still feel the wrongness in the air as they drew closer to the clan longhouses; she threw up her hand in silent warning, just as Maleek froze as well, clearly having sensed the same unpleasantness. They shared a pointed glance and both pulled down their bone goggles again, hunching low to the ground as they kept to the shadows away from the shoreline. 

The spiked wooden barricades came into view first, and the smoke coming from the chimneys of the longhouses was acrid in the air. Maleek spotted the anomaly first, breath hissing angrily from between his teeth as his hand snapped out to keep her to the shadows. At her querying look, he nodded towards the east gate, where a standard other than the one flown by Clan Imabruk Piqaluyak had been planted firmly in the icy clod.

Her heart froze in her chest.

She grimaced, catching herself a moment later. “Those are the colours are Clan Aunik Akaiya,” she said, adjusting the quiver where it hung on her back. Ila shrieked quietly in protest as his perch was jostled, and she scolded him briefly for fussing, hushing him to keep quiet. 

“What’s Movr’an doing this deep in the mountains?” Maleek said under his breath, spitting a curse into the snow. 

“Maybe he got tired of his no good son slinking home without a stolen bride and came to take matters into his own hands,” she said, trying to sound flippant but her stomach soured unpleasantly at the thought.

“Ey, because nothing shores up a clan’s standing more than a grown man’s aapa come to snatch up his bride for him.”

Lasair tried to smile, but her heart wasn’t in it; there was no easy quip on her lips now, only bitter fear curdling in her stomach. There was no sign of trouble in the settlement, no indication that Aunik Akaiya rode as a war party instead of a peaceful one- not that that would be particularly in character for the clan, known as they were for their cruel way of life and their bloodthirsty raids into the lowlands. She couldn’t exactly say she’d be a paragon of humanity if she lived in the fetid swamps and rotten hillocks that made up the territory of Aunik Akaiya, but Movr’an and his ill-got brood took things to extremes.

And it didn’t help that just last week she’d lured Movr’an’s brutish son out into the middle of the lake when he’d tried to steal her for his bride, leaving him stranded when she’d tricked him into crossing over thin ice; it wasn’t the first time Ikit had come for her, nor the first time she’d humiliated him. 

It was, however, the first time his clan had appeared in the centre of their territory in the immediate aftermath.

_If she had brought war to her people..._

She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked to see Maleek beside her, a grim look on his face. “Ey,” he said softly, “the clan will stand behind you.”

Lasair shivered. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said, before steeling herself and leaving the cover of the trees. 

There were no shouts of surprise at her appearance as she stalked towards the snow banked walls, no cries of warning or aggression; the standard of Aunik Akaiya seemed almost smugly insulting beside the main gate, and she resisted the urge to kick the bloody thing over. There were a few hunters out and about, all keeping their distance from the longhouse in the centre of the settlement, and they watched pensively as she crossed the muddy space that passed for a street towards the door. 

“Watch your bird,” Maleek called behind her, cursing as the icy mud splashed onto his pants.

“He likes the indoors,” she said, reaching up to scratch Ila on the belly. The raptor squawked softly, clearly pleased with the attention. “He sits in the rafters and eats mice and the gizzards fall down on top of asshole clansmen. It’s perfect for everyone.”

“He did that to me, once.”

“That’s because that was the day you told that boy from Silam Inua Kulvich that the bereskarn head in the longhouse was _your_ kill, not mine.”

“I was trying to get laid! A good friend would understand that and let me steal their glory for the sake of sex.”

“Oh, I understood,” Lasair said, reaching for the door to the longhouse. “That’s why I didn’t interrupt you and let you embarrass yourself, because you obviously didn’t need me to do it for you.” 

She pushed open the door, and a blast of heat rolled over her, accompanied by the stench of meat and dogs and ale and shit. There was a rumble of noise in the hall, the sounds of numerous voices all raised at once and trying to dominate the conversation, and nothing sounded friendly. 

She gritted her teeth and didn’t look back, holding her head high as she stalked through the portal. 

There were a great number of the clan’s hunters and warriors in attendance, scowling and tense as they clustered close to her father’s seat of power. Before them were the men and women of Aunik Akaiya, dressed in their finest and most frightening, skin bared to the elements to show scars earned in battle; their gear was completely inappropriate for the ice of the mountains, leather armour instead crafted from the great lumbering beasts that dwelled in the swamps in the south, their hides impervious to the rain and the rot of the bog. Sensible when they had the home advantage, but utterly foolish to risk up here in the heights. 

Ikit ar Kunik stood beside his father, fearsome in his height and bedecked with body paint and furs, rather than leathers like the rest of his clan. _Hah_ \- he must have learned his lesson after she’d dumped him in the lake. He leered at her when she entered the longhouse, and a round of unpleasant hoots and jeers filled the air as she walked calmly along the centre aisle towards her father. 

“Lasair an Suqi,” Ikit said loudly as she approached; the way he said her name made her shudder in revulsion, like he said it as an intimacy shouted loud for everyone to hear. “We had begun to think you had fled across the lake in cowardice when you saw our arrival.”

She smiled thinly at him and turned to her Jarl. “Aapa, what are they doing here?” she asked sweetly, pointedly not looking at Jarl Movr’an as she spoke. “There’s a foul odour in the hold and I’d prefer to have it dealt with.”

“They have guest’s rights, Lasair,” Jarl Massan said flatly, his displeasure clearly aimed at the bulky man standing before him, nearly a head shorter than his son but wearing the most monstrously ridiculous horns on his headpiece to make up for it. “For the time being, they are welcome amongst the hold.”

“How marvellous,” she said bluntly. “Revoke it.”

Her words prompted a roar of outrage from the crowd, and she didn’t even flinch in the face of the outpouring of wild anger. Eventually her father climbed wearily to his feet, raising his hands for calm, and even then Ikit still snarled and stepped far closer than custom allowed him. “You allow your daughter too much leeway,” Ikit growled, towering over even her father, who had to stand at least seven foot tall. Even for an Avvar, Ikit was terrifyingly huge. 

“My daughter is her own person, boy,” Massan said, his voice cold and uninterested in Ikit’s posturing. “A warrior bred, and future Jarl- if anything I don’t grant her _enough_ liberties.”

“Korth has shown us the weakness in your hold, Massan,” Ikit said with a sneer. “He has shown us the mindless beasts ready for the cull-”

Lasair, who had quietly been adjusting the rings on her right hand while he spluttered and snarled, turned on her heel and drove her fist into Ikit’s ridiculously exposed belly. She grunted in pain when the impact jarred all the way up to her shoulder, vaguely aware of the cries of surprise and outrage as everyone lurched away from them, but far more satisfied to hear Ikit’s howl of shock and pain as the ruthlessly sharp edges on the rings cut through his skin. 

The rings weren’t large enough to cause him any permanent damage, other than perhaps a scar or two, but as she twisted her wrist and jerked the razored points across his abdomen, she was satisfied enough with that. 

Movr’an lunged for her, and Ila immediately jumped from his perch, clawing and scratching at the masked helm to try and get to the Jarl’s eyes. Ikit swung wildly, his fist going too high, and Lasiar ducked under it as she stumbled backwards, saved from falling by encouraging hands on her back; the clan’s hunters had pushed forward off the walls, crowding closer to her, and all of them looked ruthlessly pleased with her actions. 

“Massan!” Movr’an roared, batting at Ila until the raptor took sanctuary in the rafters overhead, hissing and screeching and ruffling his feathers unhappily. “Your brat has broken guest’s rights-”

“Oh, my _apologies_ ,” she said calmly, flexing the fingers on her now bloodied hand and grimacing at the ache in her wrist from the impact. “Shall I fetch us all a mug of Old Korth’s Beard? Perhaps a soothing pot of tea is just what we need to calm our tempers.”

“Calm our tempers? You _broke_ your _oath!_ ”

“My oath? I made no such oath- as if I would invite the likes of you to share of our meat, and take shelter beneath our eaves!”

When Movr’an took a step towards her, there was the rattling of steel and stone as the hunters at her back drew their weapons as one. 

She tried not to feel too smug at that. 

“I’m heir to a far more powerful clan than Aunik Akaiya could ever hope to be, which makes me your _better_ , Movr’an,” she spat.

The Jarl drew himself up to his not insignificant height, a splatter of blood dripping from beneath the mask and onto his chin. “You’d best watch your tongue, _niviaksiak-_ ”

Lasair scarcely even heard the creak of wood before Maleek was beside her with his bow drawn back to its full range. “Call her that again,” he said softly, warningly, the notched arrow aimed right at Movr’an’s eyeball. 

At the edge of her vision, she saw her father settle back against his stone throne. “The fair people of Aunik Akaiya are here to seek an alliance,” he said loudly, waving his hand magnanimously to where Movr’an stood seething and Ikit stood bleeding, a hand pressed to his stomach while his eyes burned black with rage. “They are under the impression that we are in dire need of their strength and their stocks.”

“And why are we entertaining such bullshit when the Lowlanders invade our territories with no regard for our people or our gods?”

Ikit sneered at her. “Proves the point, doesn’t it?” he said, a faint hint of blood in his toothy snarl. “You can’t even defend yourself from the soft, fat lowlanders, and give them leave to run off your game and your allies. Your weakness is an insult to Korth, and should be cut out like the rotten abscess it is.”

“Your continued existence is an insult to _me_ ,” Lasair snapped, “and if you’re hoping that Korth will intervene on your behalf should I decide to beat you to death like the lowland _dog_ that you are, I wouldn’t go gambling any of my gold on your chances.”

“Do you think to challenge _me?_ ” Ikit asked incredulously, looking at several of his fellows as a slow rumble of laughter built at her words. He was, after all, an immensely intimidating opponent, and even if Lasair stood over six foot tall herself, she was dwarfed by the bulk of the marsh warrior. Most would assume her words to be little more than bluster.

“It’s not a challenge,” she said. “It’s a promise. Imabruk Piqaluyak will never stand with Aunik Akaiya, nor will we hold to guest’s rights. Let it be known that I would rather cross the lake and beseech the Lowlanders for aid than keep an oath to _you_.”

Movr’an drew back, one hand going out to his son’s chest to stop him from lunging forward. “So be it,” he said sharply. “Let it be known that Imabruk Piqaluyak are oath-breakers and the worst of kin. May the gods have mercy on you, for we shall not.”

“May great Atiqtalik sleep late on the morrow, cousin,” Massan said, rising to his feet, crossing his massive arms across his equally massive chest. “Because if the sun rises on a new day, and the great lake bear awakens to find you still on our lands, there will be no mercy for you or any of your people.”

The rival hunters and warrior began to slink from the longhouse, but Ikit and Movr’an were the last to leave. “You’ve made a grave mistake, Massan,” Movr’an growled, backing slowly towards the door. 

“That remains to be seen.”

Ikit snarled and spat near to her feet. “This is not over,” he said warningly. 

“I’d be surprised if it was,” she said, baring her teeth in a violent grin. 

Silence hung heavy in the longhouse as the snarls and shouts of the other hunters slowly faded in the distance, and Ikit and Movr’an finally shoved open the door and followed after them. The entire frame of the building shuddered as the door slammed closed again, and Lasair closed her eyes, trying not to wince. 

_What had she done..._

Behind her, Massan sighed wearily; the sound of leather came as he heaved himself back into his stone carved throne. “Tikaani, Yakone,” he said, gesturing to two women standing by to the door. They both came to their feet immediately, hands on their weapons. “Follow them and make sure they leave the village, don’t let any of them circle back around.”

They nodded sharply and both slipped through into the snow, their shadows dashing along the windows as they chased after the enemy clan. 

“Lasair.”

She congratulated herself on not flinching as she opened her eyes and turned to face him. “Aapa,” she said, her tone steady. 

Massan was rubbing at his forehead, and he seemed to have more grey in his beard than previously, his golden brown skin more aged than it had been that morning. “You have made us oath-breakers, and declared us a clan at war.”

“Aye. I have.”

“As Jarl, that should’ve been my decision, not yours,” he said patiently.

She lifted her chin, trying not to let the tears show. “We all know they were here for me,” she said, almost defiantly. “If I’d hid behind your throne and had you chase them off, it would only have gone worse for us. It would have made me look weak.”

“Instead you made me look insipid, by walking all over me.”

“A Jarl with a strong heir is a Jarl to be feared,” she said. “A Jarl with a weak heir is a man on the verge of losing his hold.”

Her father tipped his head to her in acknowledgement. “Very well, _paniga_ ,” he said. “You’ve tossed the bones into the fire, now we must wait to see how they crack. May the gods find your gambit amusing, rather than impudent.”

With a grumbling sigh, he climbed to his feet, clapping his broad hands to draw attention to him. “Let’s have hunters out on the eastern ridge, make sure those Aunik bastards take themselves home properly,” he said, gesturing to a good half of the room. “And let’s see a good showing along the shore, too, let those lowlanders know we’re here and we’re not afraid of them.”

The longhouse was a bustle of activity, hunters and warriors flowing past Lasair as they rushed to do her father’s bidding; more than one of them touched her arms in greeting as they passed, murmured words of praise and encouragement whispered for her ears only. She smiled faintly at them, the fight bleeding out of her as weariness set into her bones, the magnitude of what she’d done slowly settling over her like a sodden cloak. 

Her hand ached, the blood slowly drying over her knuckles, and she sank to her knees on the steps of her father’s throne. 

“So, we may be called to war before the Lady takes pity on us and brings the spring,” Maleek said, sinking down beside her and splaying his long legs out before him. He snorted, apparently amused. “I like a challenge. Good to remind Korth we’re not dead yet.”

She took a shaky breath and hugged her knees to her. “I guess so,” she said, her voice trembling. “May the Lady guide our hands.”

“And may Korth ignore those daft assholes in their swamp,” he said, clapping her on the back. 

She smiled weakly at him, and tried not to think of the army across the lake.


	5. Serault

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lucien de Serault (Luc) belongs to [Cade](http://skyjacklegion.tumblr.com) and for those familiar with The Last Court, is The Scholar to Ilaane's Huntress. They are both descendants of The Shame but they are not directly related.

**9:41 Dragon**   
_The Marquisate of Serault, Orlais_

_One week after the attack on the Conclave_

“ _Marcus!_ ”

The shout echoed down the hallways of the chateau, and Luc winced. “You’re in trouble now,” he said in a singsong voice, curled up in Marcus’ lap in the old leather chair in the eastern wing of the library. “That’s her angry voice.”

Marcus snorted in amusement, carding his fingers through Luc’s hair. “I wasn’t aware she had a voice _other_ than that one,” he said wryly.

Luc chuckled. “Of course she does,” he said, burying his head beneath Marcus’ chin. “She has her angry voice, and her irritated voice, and her frustrated voice, and her impatient voice, and her furious voice-”

“Oh, and this one is _just_ her angry voice? How lucky for me.”

“Quite. I’d suggest hiding, if I were you.”

“And are you going to get off my lap to facilitate my escape?”

“Gods, no. This is far funnier.”

“Remind me why I love you, again?”

From the far end of the library came the shuddering slam of a door being thrown open, the force of it enough to make a book fall from a nearby shelf. If there were any servants in the immediate vicinity, they had made themselves scarce- everyone knew to keep their heads down and carry on quietly with their business while the Marquis was in a temper. 

Everyone except Luc, of course. 

He lounged backwards off the chair, his upper torso dangling over the arm as he peered down the vaulted corridor of books; Marcus cursed under his breath and grabbed for him, his fingers twisting into his shirt to stop him from sliding off his lap and onto the floor entirely. “Anger is always repaid with anger, Laane,” he called in the same irksome singsong voice he’d used on Marcus. “Treat the house with disrespect and it will-”

“Spare me your whimsical attempts at your philosophical bullshit, Luc.” She stalked into view, her long legged stride eating up the distance between them. Ilaane de Serault, Marquis of Serault, more romantically referred to as The Huntress; she was magnificent in her anger, beautiful in a way that made you want to cringe but unable to tear your eyes away. She moved like a predator, confident and loud and aggressive, completely certain of her place at the top of the food chain. 

Too bad he wasn’t in the mood to feel like prey. 

He clucked his tongue at her scoldingly as she drew closer. “Now, now, my darling Laane, we both know my _philosophical bullshit_ is grounded in practicality- energy must always provoke a reaction, and if you are determined to only ever put out negative energy-”

“Oh, let me guess, if I leave out bowls of salt mixed with mint and glass, it will placate the house pixies?” She came to a stop before them, hands on her hips as she loomed over them. Her long dark hair had been pulled back in a simple braid, the sort she liked to wear when she went riding, and the light from the fire turned her skin to bronze. “No, wait, I’ve got it wrong- if I walk backwards past a mirror three times-”

“You are an immature little shit sometimes, you know that?”

“No, I’m _pragmatic_. There’s a difference.”

Marcus sighed dramatically from where he was still pinned beneath Luc’s weight. “As much as I enjoy it when the focus of your ire is on someone else for once,” he said, “I’d rather not hang in suspense. Why were you shouting my name so ferociously that it’s a wonder the windows didn’t shatter?”

Luc winced with false sympathy. “Oh, Marcus, it’s just that you’re not really that good at pleasuring women,” he said, patting him consolingly on the chest. “You’d be more used to her shouting your name like that if you were any good at fucking.”

Marcus promptly pushed him off his lap and onto the floor, and Luc wheezed and curled over as the impact jarred his hip. Laane stood over the two of them with a vaguely incredulous look on her face, as if she was one second away from rolling her eyes at the two of them. Everything about her, from the fine cut of her riding jacket and the sharp polish of her boots, to the strong lines of her face and the severely hawkish cut of her nose, screamed hunter and predator, a woman with intense focus and quicksilver patience, who expected in all things to be acknowledged as the dominant force. 

It was why she made a better Marquis than he did, really. He could sleep in the library on top of the court bard, and wander barefoot through the deep woods, and vanish for days at a time when the mood took him; he might have been better at reading the intrigues of the court than she was, but his temper was no better, merely quieter in its violence. 

And he much preferred it that way, as did the court; oh, some of them held the threat of it over Laane’s head sometimes, on days when she was far too stubborn for her own good. There were two equally eligible branches of the de Serault family who could rule over the marquisate, and just because Laane’s family had won the proverbial coin toss several generations ago didn’t mean that Luc was any less entitled to the seat and the title. 

That he didn’t want it meant nothing, of course- that was the nature of politics. 

“I was yelling your name,” Laane continued, interrupting his train of thought, “because that stupid fucking song that you wrote for that- that _thing_ in the forest-”

Marcus visibly perked up. “My ballad? The Shame of Serault?”

Laane’s look could have melted through steel bars. “Yes, _that_ song,” she said, seething with scarcely contained contempt, “that wretched warbling abomination that so _lovingly_ details the crimes of my ancestor and the downfall of my home-”

“I think you mean _our_ ancestor and _our_ home, my dear,” Luc said sweetly.

“If you don’t stop both interrupting me, I’m going to send you both to leave in that daft commune on Ser Wilfred’s estate, and you’ll both have to _work_ for a living.”

“You wouldn’t _dare_ ,” Marcus said, looking somewhere between scandalized and utterly horrified at the mere _suggestion_ that he be required to do manual labour. “And as if my dear uncle would ever-”

Laane pointed an elegantly sharp finger in his direction, the nail painted a vivid red and the ring she wore adequately large and intimidating. “Interrupt me one more time,” she said in a low voice, a look in her eyes that almost seemed to dare him to continue. 

Marcus shrank back into the chair, sliding down until he was slumped in it rather uncomfortably. 

“As I was saying,” Laane said slowly, once the silence held in her favour, “that wretched song need never have left the forest. You could have written it for that _thing_ and then never spoken a word of it to any of us.”

“That _thing_ has a name, you know,” Luc said, sitting up and resting his back against the side of the chair, long legs splayed out in front of him bare foot. He tended not to wear shoes around the chateau, unless they had guests and Laane made certain faces at him until he agreed to act more civilized. “And he’s my mentor, and my god.”

Her expression was pained. “Luc, I am not having that discussion again now, you are an adult and you may conduct yourself however you see fit, but I do not want to acknowledge that _creature_ in my halls.” 

He made gleefully condescending face as he spread his hands wide. “And yet you seem to be the one determined to bring him up in conversation repeatedly,” he said pointedly, grinning as she kicked his ankle.

“I did not come here to talk to you, so you can just keep your smart mouth shut.” She turned back to Marcus. “That song should have stayed in the forest- I cannot go _anywhere_ without hearing that damned-”

“ _The Shame, the Shame, forgotten by name_ ,” Luc sang softly under his breath. 

Laane kicked him again, harder this time, and ignored his muttered ‘ _ow_ ’. “Without hearing that damned song,” she finished. “It’s the most popular song in the taverns, the workers at the glassworks were singing it when I had my weekly meeting with the Guildmistress, and I even found Luci dancing in the nursery just now, singing it to herself.”

Marcus perked up quite visibly. “Luci memorized my song?” he asked, pride shining in his eyes. 

“Yes, _darling_ ,” she said warningly, “she was singing _all about_ the _terrible_ things my great-grandfather did, and I’m inclined to believe one of you is responsible for our daughter even being exposed to the song in the first place.” She paused and turned her gaze down to Luc on the floor, eyes narrowed. “And given how surprised Marcus appears to be at her achievement- which, don’t mistake me, I would normally be quite proud of her for it- that leaves _you_ , sweetheart.”

Luc tugged on the fabric of Marcus’ pants. “Are you going to let her stand there and accuse me like this?” he asked, turning his face up towards him. 

“I am but the humble servant of my Lord and my Lady, and I do not take sides.”

“You’re a coward, is what you are.”

“Coward, smart, they’re one and the same, really.”

Laane put a hand up to her forehead. “Enough,” she snapped, eyes closed in frustration. “Marcus, is the song... I don’t know, is it magic or something? Why is everyone singing it?”

“Your confidence that my artistic talents could not possibly be the reason for such interest in my work thrills me no end.”

She put her hands up in the air. “I give up,” she said, turning and walking back the way she had come. Her voice drifted back towards them as she stalked away. “Surrounded by fools and miscreants, and not an adult conversation to be had.”

The door slammed again as she left, not quite as badly as when she’d entered, and Luc sighed as he leaned back against Marcus’ leg. “So should we flip a coin to see who gets to deal with her?” he asked, toying idly with the gaudy trim along the edge of his boots.

Marcus sighed and pushed himself up from the chair. “No, I’ll do it,” he said, a resigned edge to his voice. “You just... remember me well, once I’m gone.”

Luc snorted, rubbing the back of his calf comfortingly. “She’s not that bad.”

“She’s exactly that bad,” Marcus corrected. He quite visibly steeled himself, straightening his shoulders. “Very well, then. I hope to return unmaimed.”

Watching him go, Luc tipped his head back and laughed again. “You’re both a pair of drama queens,” he called, laughing harder at the rude gesture Marcus made behind his back. “You deserve each other, to be quite honest.”

Marcus turned back to him and bowed as he walked. “I aim only to please the both of you,” he shouted, his voice echoing through the vaulted room before turning and sashaying out.

Luc grinned and then sighed, slithering backwards until he was spread eagled on the floor, pondering his next move. Dinner was still some hours away, and Laane probably had Luci under guard, given how badly she’d blown up at them both for him teaching her the lyrics. 

There was research to be done, of course- there was always research to be done, the world was a constantly evolving marvel best observed first hand. From the jagged gulleys hidden deep in the Applewoods where the tree branches reached for him when he passed, to the wild open plains that seemed to stretch south to infinity beneath the sun, to the ancient books in the library that hummed beneath his hands when he brushed his fingers over the cover, to the glassworks in town where the glass sang and the workers sang in harmony, old magics forgotten to all but the smiths of Serault... it was all wondrous and wild and primal, and it thrummed in his blood like the heat that came from downing a glass of malt whiskey. 

Instead, he closed his eyes and went back to sleep right there on the library floor. 

Naps were, after all, his primary source of entertainment. 

He awoke some time later to see the light streaming sideways through the library windows, fiercely orange like the blaze of a fire; not that unusual, really, given how much smoke the glassworks belched from the chimneys, staining the sunlight. But the colour for some reason seemed off today, in a way he couldn’t put his finger on- _balance_ , that was his mantra, his way of understanding the world, and something about the light brought to mind not the lazy warmth of a sunset but instead the stark glow of molten metal, the blaze of a hundred rooftops as burning arrows soared down from the heavens, stone turned to liquid and poured into moulds shaped for killing-

Luc shook himself and scowled, unsettled by the strength of his imaginings and far too familiar with the way his magic expressed itself to ignore it. Something was amiss in Serault, and the balance was out. 

He went to sit up and swore under his breath at the crick in his neck from sleeping on the floor. Fucking Marcus- if he’d just stayed instead of slinking after Laane, he wouldn’t have had to sleep on the floor, he could have stayed on his lap. Now he ached badly, and his mood was further soured by the warning dancing just out of his peripheral vision, enough to have him jumping at shadows but never polite enough for him to stare and scowl and get a better look at it. 

“Fuck,” he muttered as he staggered to his feet, his back burning like someone had shoved a hot poker into the muscle and then twisted viciously. Maker fucking damn it, and he’d been in such a good mood earlier today. 

He lurched out into the hallway like a drunkard, and given the way the chateau staff blanched and turned abruptly in the other direction whenever he rounded a corner, he had to assume that’s what he looked like too. Most of them knew well enough to keep their heads down when Laane was in a temper- which was regularly- but his moods had a far longer fuse, and he wasn’t prone to blowing up publicly like she was. 

It pissed him off even more to know that the servants thought him just as terrifying as her. 

The scent of dinner wafted through the chateau, and he made his way towards the dining room with stumbling steps, taking solace in the fact that he could at least stuff himself full of a half dozen dripping puddings soaking in gravy. 

The orange light of the sunset bounced through the immaculate Serault glass, a sharp and terrible warning for something he just couldn’t quite see, and the hair on the back of his neck was on end by the time he limped into the dining hall, the urge to snap and snarl and lash out building under his skin.

He rather fancied the thought of sliding into the seat beside Marcus and running his hand up the inside of his thigh beneath the limited privacy the table provided, but as he wandered into the dining hall, seeing Marcus and Laane with their heads together and their wine glasses mostly empty, cheeks flushed and sly smiles on their faces as they giggled together, it was enough to sour his mood. He didn’t doubt for a moment that if he were to wander over and join them, that they’d make room for him, that the inevitable invitation for sex would be extended to him as well, but he didn’t have the temper for it tonight. He was frustrated, and tired, and he just wanted to sink into someone and not have to think about it- he didn’t want the talking and the coordination and the intimacy that sex with two other people entailed. He wanted to bury his head in the curve of someone’s neck and bite down, and grunt and hiss, and fall asleep after without having to explain himself or make himself comfortable for someone. 

Instead he smiled thinly at two of Serault’s knights seated at the far end of the large table and slumped down into a few chairs along from them; their conversation shuddered to a hesitant stop at his sudden appearance, and a few seats along the ancient Lady Bertille and her little flock of hangers-on looked utterly appalled at his dishevelled appearance and lack of social graces. 

He extended the same sharp toothed smile to her as well, almost a sneer; Bertille had been a leech on the court since Laane’s mother had held the title, and if she wasn’t accustomed to his eccentricities by now, then there was no hope for her. 

“Young man, you are hardly appropriate,” she sniffed loudly, peering at him disdainfully over the rim of her wine goblet.

Luc winked at her, not at all in the mood for her nonsense. “For you, my Lady, I’ll be _completely_ inappropriate,” he said lasciviously, laughing into his own goblet at the horrified gasps of dismay that came from her little gaggle. 

“Just because the Divine has departed from our lands-”

“Does not mean that we are suddenly living in Val Royeaux,” he finished for her, his smile decidedly less friendly. “Now let’s all enjoy our supper in peace, hmm? Before I pass onto Ilaane some disturbing rumours I’ve heard about certain parties taking advantage of her kind hospitality?”

She drew herself up, like an old bird puffing up against a threat. “You wouldn’t _dare!_ ” 

He paused, staring at her over the top of his goblet. “Do you fancy trying me, Bertille?” he asked candidly, winking again when she went deathly white. “Didn’t think so- remember what side of the family I come down from, after all.”

The rest of supper passed by in painfully awkward silence, at least at his end of the table; he noticed the moment that Laane and Marcus left together, still giggling and carrying on like teenagers in love. There was a sharp ache in his chest watching them go, resentment and longing in one, and he pushed away from the table with a clatter of cutlery.

He snatched up a pitcher of wine from a servant entering from the kitchen, taking a swig from it directly as he sauntered from the room pretending he didn’t have a care in the world. 

An easy enough lie- he told it to himself nearly every day, after all. 

The wine made good enough company, so he took it up to his room alone, lounging in the window seat with one leg dangling over the drop to the river below, watching the sky for the first sign of stars. The wind had changed at some point during the evening, and the smoke from the glassworks was blowing towards them, the air tangy and metallic on his tongue. 

It was all remarkably routine and normal, but his skin still felt too tight, the hair on the back of his arms refusing to lie flat. There was something afoot, and he just had to grit his teeth and wait for it to reveal itself to him so that he could work towards restoring balance. 

He fell asleep there, lounging in the window frame and only half drunk on a pitcher of wine. 

It was a flash of light that woke him some time later, sharp and abrupt and white, not the warm yellow of the slowly rising sun but cold, soulless. He cursed and threw a hand up to cover his face, immediately losing his balance and toppling backwards into the room and landing with a choked howl on his hip. Panting at the burst of pain from the impact, he rolled over onto his back just in time to see the same flash of white come again.

He scowled. “What the...?”

Scrambling to his feet and rubbing at his bruised hip, he stood in the window while his senses reordered themselves- and his stomach dropped into his feet. 

The flash had come from the heliograph tower in the town, the closest mirror-tower to the chateau, and the unbroken pattern of the flares was a message. The heliographs were only used for messages of the most dire importance- it was used a few years earlier to warn them of the civil war, and only last year to announce the dissolution of the Circles and the onset of the Mage-Templar conflict. 

White and cold like the flash of steel, the glassy emptiness of the dead and their eyes-

He shook himself violently, staggering back a step from the window; his chest was heaving and he didn’t even bother to dress himself before he tore open his bedroom door and stalked into the hallway, half naked and barefoot as he nearly ran through the wing towards Laane’s private suites. 

He skidded to a halt just as a servant slipped from the door, their face drawn and haggard. The woman started in alarm at the sight of him, and he hastily dropped the instinct to grab her and shake her for answers. He didn’t stay to watch her flee, instead stepping through the door she’d left open to find answers with Ilaane.

Laane was barely dressed as she stood before the fire, only a hastily drawn robe over her minimalistic nightgown, and her hair was long and loose around her shoulders. It made her look younger, almost girlishly so, and for a moment he could have been staring at a desire demon, tugging at happier, more lustful memories.

“Laane?” he asked in sleepy confusion, rubbing at his eyes and scratching at his belly. The panic in him fizzled away seeing her so still. “What...?”

She glanced over her shoulder towards him, and his stomach fell into the ground yet again; there was a look of such extreme grief on her face, her dark eyes brimming with tears that slipped onto her cheeks even as he watched, and more than that, she was _frightened_. He could feel the fear rolling off her in waves- fear for Serault, fear for Luci, fear for herself...

Fear for _him_.

“Luc,” she whispered, her voice strong and unwavering despite the tears. He didn’t know that Laane even knew _how_ to be afraid, but he could taste it in the air around her, thick and sour and enough to make his skin crawl. He didn’t want to know what power in Thedas or beyond could frighten Laane.

And to the point of tears? 

She looked down, and he saw at last that she had something in her hand, a sheet of parchment, a letter of some kind. When she looked back up to him, he could see her heart as it broke in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Luc,” she said, another tear falling onto her cheek in silence. “I can’t protect you from this.” 

He laughed awkwardly as he ambled across the room towards her, feeling remarkably underdressed and vulnerable given the solemnity of her mood. “Laane there’s a lot of things you can’t protect me from,” he said candidly, aware of the way the firelight flickered over her, turning her skin to gold, priceless but weighed down, so very heavy with responsibility, overburdened and unbalanced-

He blinked, having lost his train of thought. “Now, is it really worth dragging us both out of bed in the middle of the night, hmm?” He came to a stop before her, running his hands up the outside of her arms to soothe her. She was cold, almost alarmingly so, and he leaned forward to brush a kiss against her forehead, a whisper of warmth in the gesture to bring her back into balance. 

She scowled, the tears making her lashes look even thicker and darker than normal. “You asshole, _I_ didn’t drag you out of bed, and right now I’m trying to be serious,” she said, but she didn’t push him away. 

“You’re always serious. I’m surprised you don’t have a permanent scowl- you know, if you’re scowling like that when the wind changes, your face will be stuck like that.”

“I did not get out of bed in the middle of the night just to let you sidetrack me with your bullshit fairytales-”

“Oh, you say that _now_ , but which one of us trained under a forest god, hmm?”

She punched him gently in the chest, no real steel behind the gesture. “Just- _listen_ , would you? Okay?” She reached up to wipe away the tears, casting him a dark look when he chuckled. “You’re an asshole.”

“You’re just repeating arguments. No new material?”

“The Divine is _dead_ , Luc,” she said, thrusting the letter up under his nose. The words blurred this close, and she seemed determined to shove the damn thing up his nostril entirely. “Justinia has been _murdered_ , and she most recently came out of her way- a _long_ way out of her way- to see us.”

He paused, frozen in the middle of trying to ease the letter from her fingers. “That’s...” He tried to find a word to express the magnitude of his feelings. “... shit.”

“You’re so eloquent. Why do I even need advisors?”

He raked a hand through his hair, frustration and fear seething in his belly. “What do you _want_ me to say, Laane?” he snapped, matching her temper with his own. “I _said_ it was a fucking bad idea having her come here-”

“We needed her to restore our honour-”

“Who gives a fuck about honour? Laane, we quite _literally_ have mages walking the streets- our _daughter_ is a mage- and the entirety of Serault’s fortunes are tied up in the glassworks, which again! Is the work of mages.” He turned his back on her, nervous energy forcing him to pace. “It was hard enough keeping it out of sight for the visit, but now? Now everyone is going to be wondering why she came to us, now they’re going to send Seekers and Templars and they’re going to _find_ us Laane-” 

“I’m not going to let that happen.”

“ _Bullshit_ , you are!” He spun back around to face her, a finger stabbed accusingly towards her face. “What are you gonna do, just meet them at the border and deny them entry? Put on your fancy glass deer horns that you sold us out for and prance in front of them and-”

She slapped him, the strike burning against his skin. There were tears on her cheeks, and her chin was wobbling dangerously, and the look in her eyes was soul-crushing. “Ever since my mother died I have been trying my _hardest_ to turn this fucking _ruin_ of a town into something to be proud of,” she said, her voice low and dangerous. Even when crying, she still sounded like she was a second away from flaying the skin from his body. “I will not leave our daughter with the burden of debt and rebellion and mockery that was left to me- what I do, I do for her.”

He put a hand up to his still aching cheek. “Well, I hope that thought keeps you warm when they drag her away-”

“There _are_ no more _fucking_ Circles, _Lucien_ ,” she snarled, and instinct told him to step away from her before she lashed out. 

“Except Serault, the worst kept secret in Orlais.”

“ _Get out_.” Her voice was shaking, almost as badly as she was. “I need to make preparations to save my people, and I don’t have the patience to deal with your bullshit.”

Luc stared at her, breathing hard through his nose. “She’s my daughter too,” he spat, but the threat felt hollow. “I could just take her into the Deepwoods, away from all of this.”

“And she’s Marcus’ daughter too, and as much as you’re pissed off at me, you won’t hurt him. Get out.”

For a long, painful moment they stared at each other, Laane’s chin held high and her face utterly livid despite the tears on her face. Luc broke first, laughing bitterly under his breath and shaking his head. He wanted to say something witty and cutting, something to know that he’d walked away the victor, but nothing came to mind. 

So he ran, like the coward that he was. 

The hallways passed by him in a blur, the chateau slowly coming to life around him as news spread of the devastating message spread by the heliograph. In the distance, he could hear the bell in the Chantry steeple tolling, and each booming tone sent a lurching shiver from his gut down to his toes. 

He ran down the servant’s staircase and through the back corridors, bursting out into the night still half dressed and barefoot. The stables were dark, the occupants stamping and whickering uneasily, as on edge as he was; he snatched up a worn old coat from the workshop, hoping the owner would forgive him for the temporary theft as he slung it over his shoulders, chest still bared to the night but it was a mild improvement against the cold. 

Laane’s stallion was by far the most intelligent and glorious beast in the chateau’s collection of horses, and he was well suited to her temperament and impetuousness when the thrill of the hunt took her; to her immense displeasure, however, Chasseur was all but moonstruck over Luc, and whenever he was present the stallion was practically deaf to Laane’s commands, instead eagerly following after him like a puppy. 

Tonight was no different, and even in the darkness he could see the alertness in the dark eyes as he approached the stall, ears flicking in excitement at the unexpected visit. He pushed forward eagerly as Luc opened the stall, his face snuffling at his pockets, and Luc’s quiet laugh was strained.

“I don’t have any treats for you,” he murmured, rubbing his hand over Chasseur’s head, “but I need your help. Please?”

The horse snorted.

“Fine. I’ll bring a treat back in the morning, okay?” Chasseur pushed his head into his arms, nearly knocking him over. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

He clambered atop Chasseur’s back without bothering with the saddle or the tack, patting the horse’s neck when he was settled and trusting him not to throw him off. The stallion seemed to sense the urgency of the situation, and he took off for the bridge into the township proper with a lurch, more speed than was sensible in the cobbled streets and darkness.

Luc wasn’t really feeling all that sensible right now. 

Chasseur broke into a gallop once they reached the fields on the far side of town, the road crunching beneath his hooves as they raced along in the darkness. He almost didn’t need direction, turning to face the right way with barely a touch of guiding pressure from Luc’s knees. They ate up the miles, the stars blazing overhead while the bell tolled ominously behind them; the thunder of Chasseur’s steps seemed to build a sinister rhythm around them, the Chantry bells setting the pace.

_The Divine is dead, the Divine is dead, the Divine is dead..._

The broken tower came into view, a stark silhouette against the clear night sky, and the forest rose up behind it too, snarled branches reaching towards the heavens like longing fingers. It had once been a heliograph tower, but as to who it was passing a message to- or _from_ , this close to the edge of the world, who could _possibly_ have lived in the Deepwoods, a place of heavy magic and ancient shadows- he had never been able to determine. 

Whatever purpose it had once served, or whoever’s purpose it had once served, it now had a new master. 

Luc jumped from Chasseur’s back before the stallion had drawn to a proper halt, vaulting down and sinking his bare feet into the mossy ground, putting a soothing hand on the horse’s neck to soothe him to a stop. The last thing he wanted was for Chasseur to break his leg on a chunk of broken masonry in the darkness.

He was breathing heavily by the time he staggered into the central pillar of the tower- there was a tree growing up through the interior, reaching towards the stars, and a pool of water bubbling over the roots. His chest was heaving, slicked with sweat that had gone cold and slimy against his skin in the chill of the night; his breath was fogging the air in front of his mouth, the hairs on his arm standing on end.

“Get out here, you asshole!” he yelled, kicking at a fallen branch. “I know you’re here, I can sense you.”

For a moment, the forest hung eerily still in response to his outburst, like a breath held, and his fingers curled against his palms, ready to form a fist to lash out. There was magic simmering under his skin, frustration in the form of wildly nervous energy, and he wanted to scream and kick and let the fire burning within him escape. 

And then, his god appeared. 

There was an old tale about his great grandfather, about him binding a great demon to the land and setting it loose in the woods. As with most stories, it had only grown more extravagant with each retelling, but a kernel of truth remained. There _was_ a great spirit bound to the land, and it was old, far older than his great grandfather- but The Shame had no more been responsible for the Lord of the Forest than he had been for the return of dragons at the end of the Blessed Age. 

But he had learned a great deal at the feet of the entity, just as Luc had as a boy. 

He felt the ripple of power in the air, a wildness that thrummed in his blood, and then he was there- half shadow and half flesh, horns reaching towards the deep black sky in a macabre mimic of Laane’s horned glass mask. The Lord of Forest and Song, the king of the places where mortal feet dared not tread- spirit, mage, immortal, god-creature. He was many things and half of them had no explanation in mortal tongues. 

Luc didn’t care right now if he wanted to call himself the Black Divine- right now he was _angry_.

He planted both hands on the creature’s chest and shoved. “You _knew!_ ” he shouted, his voice ringing around the hollow shell of the tower. “You knew she was going to die, you fucking _knew!_ ”

Unsurprisingly, the Lord didn’t even waver at his shove; he’d have more success trying to move the tower itself. There was a vast creaking groan, something that sounded like ancient trees begrudgingly bending in the face of a winter storm, and he knew instinctively that the Lord had sighed, his head tilting to the side as if in confusion. 

Luc didn’t give a shit about his confusion; he was shaking from adrenalin, tears burning at his eyes as he clenched his fists at his sides. “Is that why you wanted to meet her? Because you knew she was going to die?”

Nothing. No reaction whatsoever.

He wanted to tear his hair out in frustration. “Do you know what this has done to us? To my family? They’ll look to us, they’ll look to Serault and the worst kept secrets in the whole of Thedas, and they’ll go ‘ _gee, isn’t it odd that the Divine went out of her way to visit a seething hotbed of mages and revolutionaries just a month ago, and now she’s been killed by magic?_ ’ and they’ll come and _they’ll find us_.”

The Lord just watched him from behind the moss covered bone mask, his true face hidden from view but his darkly alien eyes glittering in the starlight. 

“Do you not care at all? You could have warned me!” His anger was morphing into hysteria, the tears on his cheeks now. “I could have stopped this from happening, but now they’ll come, and they’ll take my baby girl and my people and they’ll execute Laane for harbouring mages and _I could have stopped it!_ ”

A hand whipped out and slapped him across the face for the second time that night, the lash of tree roots and the fierce bite of the wind and the heavy thud of stone in the gesture. He staggered back a step, reeling from the blow, but then the Lord had his head grasped tightly in both hands, holding him upright in an iron grip as he forced him upright again. 

“What-?”

Eyes as dark and unfathomable as the infinite sky above them locked onto his and one hand kept his jaw held firmly shut as the other pulled back, a pointed, unnatural finger aimed directly at his face. 

Breathing wildly from between clenched teeth, Luc forced out “ _What?_ ”

The hand reversed and the thumb was held up instead; it pressed down onto his forehead hard, and it was like a needle had pierced through the bone straight to his brain- he opened his mouth to scream, body numb with shock at the surge of pain, and then-

_Flash of green, bright and cold, twisting through flesh, burning to ash. An eye, dripping blood, turning to watch him wherever he turned. The eye, the eye, a sword pierced the eye, green and red and an eye._

_And a face. A woman, brown face contorted in pain as the green light washed over her._

_And an eye._

He could hear someone screaming, and he realised after a moment that it was him just as the Forest Lord gently pushed him backwards. The moment his thumb left his skin the pain stopped, and Luc toppled over onto his back, lying wheezing on the mossy ground while little spasms wracked his body. He raised a shaking hand to his head, half expecting to find an open wound in the centre of his forehead; but the skin was smooth and unbroken, with only a splitting headache for his troubles. 

He wiped at his face as he shivered, and the back of his hand came away wet and dark. His nose was bleeding all over his stolen coat, how delightful. 

He closed his eyes, abruptly exhausted as he lay against the damp, cold moss. “What were you even trying to show me apart from your newfound eye fetish?” he mumbled, throwing an arm over his face. Spirits, but it felt like a landslide had crashed down on top of him. 

The energy in the air around him changed, the charge fading and softening until there was something almost deceptively placid and calming to the night, enough to soothe his racing heart and lull him back towards a sense of comfort. Even the cold had gone from the air, his exposed skin no longer stinging from the sharp chill. 

With an exaggerated groan, he pulled himself into a sitting position, his elbows resting on his raised knees and his head drooping so that the blood spilled onto the ground, rather than the coat. The Lord of the Forest was crouching before him, no malice in his posture at all- instead he seemed concerned, if such a thing were possible for him, his head still cocked curiously to the side as he watched him in silence. 

Luc let out a shaky laugh of disbelief. “I _need_ to fix this,” he said softly, pointedly. “I need to save my family- I don’t know what any of that vision has to do with that.”

The creature heaved in a great breath. “ _Balance_ ,” he said, the voice like the rumble of mountains and the vast whispering sigh of the forest. 

“Balance, yes, balance is great, you taught me all about that-”

“ _Balance is gone_.”

“Well, I could have prevented that from ever happening if you’d just-”

“ _No_.”

He ran a hand over his face. “I’m trying really hard to be patient right now,” he said, staring at the smear of darkness over his palm where he’d wiped away the blood under his nose, “and maybe if it were just me at risk, I’d be able to. But I can’t let them take Luci. I _can’t_.”

His voice cracked on the last word, the fear and the terror and the hopelessness bubbling up within him, and he put the less bloodied hand over his eyes before he started blubbing and weeping like a boy with a skinned knee. 

There was a sense of movement before him, and he peered out from between his fingers to see the Lord of the Forest extending a hand to him, his vaguely branch-like fingers closed tight around something in his palm. Rubbing wearily at his eyes, Luc held out a hand in supplication, trying not to let the flicker of hope within him burst into a wildfire. 

Something smooth and round was pressed into his hand and he took a deep breath before looking down... only to frown in confusion. 

“What the void is this?” he asked, even knowing he wouldn’t get a straight answer. “I told you I need to save my family, and you give me a vial of dirt?”

It was the same sort of ampoule that he’d expect to see being crafted in bulk in the glassworks in town- the glass clear and smooth and free of even the slightest imperfection. Even in the darkness, the vial was clear enough to see the contents with ease, rich dark earth with chips of stone and fluffy, delicate roots like strings of spiderweb. 

“A vial of dirt,” he said, and he laughed bitterly. “Fantastic. Just what I needed to solve the murder of the Divine and ease any suspicions against my family.”

The creature heaved a sigh that sounded more like the vast creaking of the forest when a gale ripped through the branches, and held out the other hand. Luc glared at him suspiciously, but held up his palm to accept whatever other gift he thought fit to bestow on him. 

Something smooth and curved fell into his upturned hand, and he looked down to see-

\- another fucking vial of dirt. 

Luc sighed. “I give up,” he said, flopping back onto the mossy ground. “I’m going to die. My family is going to die.”

The eerie fingers closed over his hand and tightened. “ _For you_ ,” came the ancient voice. The fingers moved to his other hand. “ _For her_.”

“Who is her?”

Unbidden, the woman from the vision swam back into focus, hair tangled and dark, brown skin scattered with freckles, and furious determination in her eyes as pain twisted her face. 

“ _Her_.”

“Who is she?”

When there was no answer, he lifted his head off the ground and looked around, unsurprised but disappointed to find himself alone in the ruins of the tower. There were no more answers for him here tonight- the creature had done much to guide him and teach him over the years, but his thought processes were far from human. As far as he was concerned, he probably thought he’d given Luc all the tools he needed, regardless of how bewildering he actually found it. 

The vials felt faintly warm in his palms, not quite humming but enough that he had to cock his head to the side to listen to the world, to see what it was playing at the edge of his senses. 

And then he laughed, his arm falling over his face as he fought off the edge of hysteria. “Ahh, fuck,” he said, almost fondly, exhaustion seeping into his bones. 

The ride back to town was nowhere near as hectic as his midnight gallop hours before, and Chasseur seemed to sense his need for comfort. The horse behaved himself remarkably, as gentle as a colt without a single moment of stubborn hoof-stamping whimsy on his part. When they finally crossed the bridge back towards the chateau, the eastern sky was ever so faintly grey, a vague precursor to the oncoming dawn; Luc still took the time to rub down Chasseur’s flanks and cool him down after the run, brushing his coat until it shone in the lantern light. 

“I’ll be back later with treats,” he promised, staggering towards the back stairs; he didn’t fancy his chances of sneaking back up to bed without being seen, but he also didn’t want to just saunter through the grand front doors of the chateau looking like a bloodied vagrant either.

Up innumerable twisting stairs towards his room, and then he was crossing the sanctity of the threshold, shuddering with relief as he felt the familiar magic imbuing the stone and the hearth, settling over his skin like a warm, old blanket. The stolen coat was discarded by the door, a bloodied lump of leather, and he stumbled over to his bedside cabinet to where a pitcher of water sat beside a shallow bowl and a fraying cloth; with shaking hands, he poured out a measure of water into the bowl and set to scrubbing the blood away from his face and arms, weariness dragging at his heels.

And beneath the exhaustion crept the fear, cold and slithering and insidious, and when the water in the bowl was red and cloudy he set the cloth down, leaning heavily on the cabinet as he felt the tears burn at his eyes anew. 

_What the fuck was he supposed to do to save them all?_

“Daddy?”

He lurched around in surprise, his heart hammering in his chest as he spun about to see his daughter standing just inside the door to his room, her curly blonde hair tangled from sleep and her brown skin still bearing the imprint of the pillow she’d been sleeping on. 

“Hey, Luci Goosey,” he said, quickly wiping away the tears with the back of his hand and turning towards her with a wide smile. “How’s my baby girl?”

She had a perceptive scowl on her little brown face, her fat cheeks plumped out as she pursed her lips. “Daddy, why are you crying?” she said, less of a question and more of an accusation, tiny clenched fists going onto her hips. 

_Shit_. “I’m just tired, little goose,” he said, dropping to a crouch so that he was at eye level with her. “What are you doing out of bed? How’d you get out of the nursery without waking nanny?”

“Nanny made a nest on the floor again with the blankets,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world and he should have known; she was so dramatic at times, so like her mother. “And she left the window open.”

Luc rubbed at his face wearily. “She promised to stop doing that,” he muttered, trying not to sigh. “Was it too cold, baby girl? Is that why you got out of bed?”

She shook her head and crouched down to match him; he tried not to laugh at how serious she was trying to look. “ _He_ came to my window again,” she said solemnly. “He grew a flower out of his hand for me.”

He felt his skin crawl. “You didn’t take it, did you?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm and measured. _She’s too young_ , his racing thoughts screamed, _don’t do this now. Not while I can’t protect her._

She shook her head sternly. “You said not to,” she said knowledgeably. “You said I had to have more birthdays first.”

Luc laughed shakily, relief washing over him. “That’s right, Luci Goosey, and how many birthdays did we say?”

“At least four more,” she said, scrunching her face up to express some emotion he couldn’t quite grasp.

“That’s my girl.”

She paused, quite obviously thinking hard, and then she spoke in a very small voice that broke his already battered heart into pieces. “You’re going to go away, aren’t you daddy?”

A thousand lies bubbled up to his lips, one denial after the other; instead he swallowed them down, and held out his arms to her. She clambered up into his lap, her little hands surprisingly strong as she clung to his shoulders. “I think I am, little goose,” he said softly, the truth finally, horrifyingly settling over him. “I think I am.”

He had to find the woman from the vision.

He had to save his family.


End file.
